Holding Wonder

off balance and snatched his hand from my wrist. He hit the water just as the silvery slick arrived.
And the slick swallowed Rafe before my eyes. Only briefly did it let go of one of his arms-a hopelessly reaching arm that hadn't yet realized that its flesh was already melted off and only bones were reaching.
I crouched on the Point and watched half my boulder dissolve into the silver and follow Rafe down into the dark, convulsed depths. The slick was gone and Rafe was gone. I knelt, nursing my wrist with my other hand. My wrist still burned where Rafe's fingernails had scratched as he fell. My wrist carries the scars still, but Rafe is gone.
My breath shuddered as I turned back to the children.
"Well," I said, "what did happen? Shall we write our story now?"
What Happened? Bobby's daddy thinks maybe the magnetic poles changed and north is west now or maybe east. Gloryanne's mother says it must have been an atom bomb. Malina's Uncle Don says the San Andreas fault did it. That means a big earthquake all over everywhere. Celia's grandfather says the Hand of God smote a wicked world. Victor thinks maybe it was a flying saucer. Ken thinks maybe the world just turned over and we are Australia now. Willsey doesn't want to know what happened. Maria doesn't know. She couldn't see when it was happening.
"So you see," I summed up. "Nobody knows for sure what happened. Maybe we'll never know. Now, why do we stay here?"
"Because"-Bobby hesitated-"because maybe if here is like this, maybe everywhere is like this. Or maybe there isn't even anywhere else anymore."
"Maybe there isn't," I said, "But whether there is or not and whatever really happened, it doesn't matter to us now. We can't change it. We have to make do with what we until we can make it better.
"Now, paper monitor," I was briskly routine. "Pass the paper. All of you write as carefully as you can so when: take your story home and let people read it, they'll say, `Well! What an interesting story! instead of `Yekk! Does this say something? Writing is no good unless it can be read. The eraser's here on my desk in case anyone goofs You may begin."
I leaned against the window sill, waiting. If only we adults would admit that we'll probably never know what really happened-and that it really doesn't matter. Inexplicable things are always happening, but life won't wait for answers-it just keeps going. Do you suppose Adam's grandchildren knew what really happened to close Eden? Or that Noah's grandchildren sat around wondering why the earth was so empty? They contented themselves with very simple, home-grown explanations-or none at all-because what was, was. We don't want to accept what happened and we seem to feel that if we could find an explanation that it would undo what has been done. It won't. Maybe some day someone will come along who will be able to put a finger on one of the points in the children's story and say, "There! That's the explanation." Until then, though, explanation or not, we have our new world to work with.
No matter what caused the Torn Time, we go on from here-building or not-building, becoming or slipping back. It's as simple as that.
SWEPT AND GARNISHED
THE STREET looked so wide and empty! Oh, so beautifully empty all the way from the bus corner to her apartment building that ended the street and made of it a sort of corridor two blocks long. The sun, at its setting, came slanty between the warehouses behind and a little to the left of the apartment. Long shadows striped the street-long sharp shadows that mouthed-
Tella laughed quietly and clasped her hands together under her chin, her purse thumping her thin chest. Long, sharp shadows that used to mouth! Oh, how wonderful to be free, to be emptied of the torment of anxiety, the dread, the fear, the terror that walketh– She tucked her purse under her elbow and started up the old familiar street that had become so new.
Just look! Just look how smoothly one step follows another when you have no terror to stumble your feet, when walking is just for going home, not for evading, dodging, fleeing– And here's that basement areaway. Tella closed a thin hand around one of the black iron spikes and, leaning over, looked down into the diagonal shadow. See? Nothing! Empty.
Her chest tightened. Of course it didn't tighten with the old dread, but with the realization that the old dread was gone, was finished, was through.
And now the broken patch of sidewalk. She crossed it in two carefully casual steps, smiling to know that no Anything would ever again twang itself up in the cabalistic pattern of the cracks in the paving to tangle her feet and strangle her ankles. She stamped her foot on the last humping of the buckled walk. Hollow-that's all. Empty.
How easily she could walk the whole two blocks now. Some day soon she might even smile and speak to someone-maybe Mr. Favella who always spoke to everyone who passed him as he stood in front of his little butcher shop, his plump hands clasped over the tight white roundness of his apron. Him first, of course, because, after all, it was his door frame that she had clung to that incredible day when the whole two blocks of the street had upended itself in a vast convulsion and poured all its terror and menacing horror down upon her so furiously and so fast that the only way she could keep from being smothered and crushed and disintegrated was to scream and cling and scream and cling until they wrapped a hospital around her and helped her empty herself of terror and delusion.
And there was the window. She could smile almost affectionately at it now. Only an empty window in an empty– Her steps quickened. And there-and there-nothing any more. Ended. Over with. No need for all the subterfuge, the patterns, the devices, to insure her getting past them safely once more.
The intersection-now it was only two streets, crossing each other, with no special menacing significance. She crossed, looking to the right to no fire, looking to the left to no flood. Now the houses. Only houses where people lived. Maybe someday she'd say `hi' to a child, if there was a child to come out of one of the houses. When you are so busy surviving two endless blocks, you can't waste energy noticing people. People don't devour-
She looked back openly. No more the furtive, stricken, sideglance to be sure that nothing-
And now, the picket fence she no longer had to touch in such a frozen pattern. She let her forefinger flick across six or eight pickets and smiled to see the white paint chalking off on her finger. How busy she had always been remembering the required pattern here, the necessary movements there. But no
more! Oh, no more!
The grating! Oh my! The grating in the sidewalk! She smiled tenderly for her old self, remembering one rainheavy night when it had taken her two hours to cross the grating because the counting wouldn't come right for some reason. Even Mrs. Larson's coming out of her house and taking her hand and pulling her over the grating did no good. She had had to go back and do it right. Otherwise-well, the tension alone would have pulled her back like a rubber band, even if the broken pattern hadn't destroyed her first. One day soon she must speak to Mrs. Larson, too. But now-the grating. Easy! Step-clutter-over. Nothing but an em-
The feeling in her chest was stronger. It was so heavy that it caught her breath. Or maybe it was so light that it sucked her breathing.
She came to her building. She fumbled for her keys as she walked firmly up the four steps. She unlocked the front door and stepped in. See? See how nice not to have to pay a toll of terror to get into the building. And the stairs up to her second floor apartment innocent stairs, shadowy only because the light was so small. Nothing anywhere, now. All em-