Smoke and Sorry
You find him at the edge of the grey meadow, where the color stops. He's sitting in the last of the green grass with his back to a fence post, knees up, half a boy — the other half keeps guttering into smoke and pulling itself back, like a candle flame in a draft, like something too tired to hold its shape.
He hears you coming. Of course he does; ears like that. He doesn't run. That's the thing you'll hold onto: he doesn't run, he just says, to his knees, in a small rough voice, “Go away. You were clever. You caught it. Congratulations.”
“It,” you say, and sit down in the grass — not close, but not far — with the picnic basket you carried the whole way at a dead sprint. “We caught you. And then I thought about what we caught. Somebody who came to hunt and stopped hunting. Somebody who's been standing next to warm things for two weeks like — like a kid outside a bakery.” You open the basket. No horseshoes this time; you dumped them in the creek. Just pancakes, slightly crushed, still warm in their towel, the syrup in Aunt Bee's honey jar. “I'm sorry about the iron. That was us being scared instead of kind, and my unicorn friend—” his head comes up sharply; in for a penny, “—yeah. She says nothing that hesitates before a name has finished deciding what it is.”
You hold out the pancakes across the space between you, into the space between his columns. The smoke half of him flickers. The boy half of him looks at the basket, and at you, and at the grey meadow waiting behind him like an open door back to nothing.