"How about my hands?"
"I see one crawling on your knee like a daddy longlegs."
"How about the other one?"
"It's crawling too."
"I got a body?"
"Shaping up fine."
"I'll need my head to go home, Old Lady."
To go home, she thought wearily. "No!" she said, stubborn and angry. "No, you ain't got no head. No head at all," she cried. She'd leave that to the very last. "No head, no head," she insisted.
"No head?" he wailed.
"Yes, oh my God, yes, yes, you got your blamed head!" she snapped, giving up. "Now fetch me back my bat with the needle in his eye!"
He flung it at her. "Haaaa-yoooo!" His yelling went all up the valley, and long after he had run toward home she heard his echoes, racing.
Then she plucked up her kindling with a great dry weariness and started back toward her shack, sighing, talking. And Charlie followed her all the way, really invisible now, so she couldn't see him, just hear him, like a pine cone dropping or a deep underground stream trickling, or a squirrel clambering a bough; and over the fire at twilight she and Charlie sat, him so invisible, and her feeding him bacon he wouldn't take, so she ate it herself, and then she fixed some magic and fell asleep with Charlie, made out of sticks and rags and pebbles, but still warm and her very own son, slumbering and nice in her shaking mother arms... and they talked about golden things in drowsy voices until dawn made the fire slowly, slowly wither out....
7
THE FLYING MACHINE
In the year a.d. 400, the Emperor Yuan held his throne by the Great Wall of China, and the land was green with rain, readying itself toward the harvest, at peace, the people in his dominion neither too happy nor too sad.
Early on the morning of the first day of the first week of the second month of the new year, the Emperor Yuan was sipping tea and fanning himself against a warm breeze when a servant ran across the scarlet and blue garden tiles, calling, "Oh, Emperor, Emperor, a miracle!"
"Yes," said the Emperor, "the air is sweet this morning."
"No, no, a miracle!" said the servant, bowing quickly.
"And this tea is good in my mouth, surely that is a miracle."
"No, no, Your Excellency."
"Let me guess then--the sun has risen and a new day is upon us. Or the sea is blue. That now is the finest of all miracles."
"Excellency, a man is flying!"
"What?" The Emperor stopped his fan.
"I saw him in the air, a man flying with wings. I heard a voice call out of the sky, and when I looked up, there he was
, a dragon in the heavens with a man in its mouth, a dragon of paper and bamboo, colored like the sun and the grass."
"It is early," said the Emperor, "and you have just wakened from a dream."
"It is early, but I have seen what I have seen! Come, and you will see it too."
"Sit down with me here," said the Emperor. "Drink some tea. It must be a strange thing, if it is true, to see a man fly. You must have time to think of it, even as I must have time to prepare myself for the sight."
They drank tea.
"Please," said the servant at last, "or he will be gone."