"This one, this easy charge, of all the trees
In Paradise that bear delicious fruit
So various, not to tasted that only Tree
Of Knowledge planted by the Tree of Life.
So near grows death to life, whate’er death is" (Milton, 4:421-425)
The shuffle down the stairs was hasty as to make it to the table by eight, in order to make it to the bus stop by eight twenty-five. A small figure, a child if you like, tumbled into the kitchen. Lucky for him the bus stop was at the end of the driveway. A reach to the cabinet for cereal, and a bowl, the spoon was laid out already by his mum. A newpaper sat untouched at the table, a cascade of milk fell over small rings until it reached the brim.
Simultaneously he shoved the spoon into the bowl with one hand and unfolded the newpaper with the other. Looking to the small print and feeding himself blindly the child began to carefully scan the fragments on the front page. He sits on his feet and rocks forward, pushing the paper from the side of his bowl to right in front of it. Suspending his torso over the cereal bowl, he begins to read:
"Texas Polyamy Raid May Pose Risk" is the first headline on page A1. The word polygamist, the name “Short Creek” and the phrase Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, in their uncertainty intrigue the tiny figure. Like a plate techtonic he shifts back to spoon another bite into his gob. Uncertainty begets significance, and the wheels start turning inside his imagination as he begins construct a blueprint for the bridge which will make the world traversable.
They call these children latch-key children, and I am not sure if they still exist. I speak from experience when I describe the small key which attached to a key ring built into an L.L. Bean backpack, the kind every fourth grader had. A child, a key and absent parents render a latch-key kid, and our present subject is just that. He rocks forward again, the next healine finds:
"Two Russian Cult Members 'Died Underground'". Suddenly there was a new space the bridge had to consider, the underground. The article threatened that the end of the world was near. Our latch-key child felt a cold stream rush up his spine. To calm the rapids he decided that this threat was specific to another world, a magical world, Russia. It was not the world he knew that was ending, Russia was ending, the only way in was the underground, and before he could finish reading the article he wondered, who would save them?
In this moment he carelessly dropped the spoon into the bowl, milk splashed across the print. The tiny words on pages A1, A2 and A3 mingled in a murky spot of grey. He imagined the walls and the ceiling of the underground to be paved with murky newsprint, and all of Russia to flooding milk, dripping into the underground. He desperately needed to begin work on a bridge, he needed to fit the fragements together, he needed to answer the questions that begin with why?
He glanced back over the first article and saw that 416 children were removed from the polygamist compound because a 16-year old had called on a cellphone, probably from Russia, in a cry for help. He began to piece it all together. The 16-year old called her friends in Texas to come save her from the end of the world. Since two had died already she called for a herd of children to enter into Russia through the murky underground and rescure her from the end of the world.
After sorting this out our latch-key child looked to the clock and saw that the big hand almost touched the five. He hesitated, then felt confident that he had build a solid bridge between two fragments, and so he closed the newspaper quickly, grabbed his bag and left his cereal bowl half eaten at the table. He rushed out the door and ran up the stairs of the bus and sat in the second seat where he always sat, ready to begin another schoolday, knowing that the fragments of the world did indeed fit together in some way, but that if he were to sort it all out he would have to begin waking up earlier. During the bus ride he daydreamed about the way in which the fragments from the F section of the paper could complete the fragments from the A section of the paper.
The next morning his mum will sit at the same table in the same chair. She will not eat breakfast this morning, she is filled with an emptiness, there are no fragments left on the ground, only ashes, complete separation. She will rock heartbroken over the paper, and will read, "Third Grader Kills Two Classmates".
***This is the fanciful rough draft***
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