Sky Inside

One The first day of spring had come to the suburb, bringing its subtle but unmistakable signs. Martin noticed them right away as he left his house that morning. The recording that played through the neighborhood speakers was different, for one thing. It had lost its spooky, desolate sound. And wiry old Mr. LaRue was kneeling on the sidewalk next door, peeling the glittering snowflakes off his big picture window and sticking a line of pink and yellow flowers there instead. Cassie wanted to watch, so Martin loitered on the sidewalk to let her. He gazed down the curving row of redbrick houses that framed the circular street, hooked together so that the garage wall of one became the bedroom wall of the next. The houses had identical windows, identical doors, and identical garage doors. At each garage, the pale gray sidewalk slanted down to the dark gray street so that scooter wheels could roll over it. Then the curb rose again and became level until the next garage: dip, rise, dip, rise, all around the edge of the street, like a perfect piecrust. In the center of the circle lay the park, with its wide green-gravel spaces, dusty baseball field, bonded-rubber jogging track, and brightly colored play structures. The exact middle was a fishpond where Dad went to practice casting. Once, this park had seemed like a wonderland to Martin, and it had only recently ceased to be a marvel to his six-year-old sister. Now it was just the park: a good thing, to be sure, but a place of limited joys. "See," directed Mr. LaRue, pausing in his work to glance up at them, "see, these are roses, and these are daffodils." He unstuck an orangey yellow flower from the vinyl sheet and carefully smoothed it onto the window glass. "They're for spring. It's spring now, you know." "The vernal equinox," Cassie agreed. Martin was bored. He had seen a number of springs arrive, had heard the speakers change their music and watched the plastic flowers go up on front windows across the neighborhood. None of it interested him anymore. Just this year, he had begun to grow at a prodigious rate, zooming past his peers, looking down on their hair parts and cowlicks. Not one ounce of weight, it would seem, had come with this growth, so he was beginning to resemble an Elasto-doll or a spaghetti noodle. His hair was such a dark shade of brown that everyone called it black, and his eyes were such a dark hazel that they looked brown. Only when he was excited did flecks of green and gold light up in them, but that didn't happen very often. Usually, Martin was assessing life cautiously from behind lowered eyelids: thinking of ways to escape class, thinking of plausible excuses for not doing schoolwork, or thinking of the millions of things he would rather do than sit in class and do schoolwork. No spark of color lit his eyes then. "Stop looking sullen!" his teacher would snap. Martin sighed and tilted his head back, gazing at the network of steel girders that held up the immense dome enclosing their suburb. The vast metal structure was painted pale blue with big white splotches wherever the square golden skylights didn't intrude. Clouds, his granny had called those white blotches. He didn't see why they needed a special name. High above him, a tiny inconspicuous figure crawled along one of the steel beams. Blue against the enormous blue ceiling, a tool bot was checking the rivets. As it crawled onto a cloud, the robotic form stood out clearly for a few seconds. Then it paused, probably to adjust its settings, and turned white, blending in once more. A cloudy bot was harder to see than a blue one. Martin lost it against the faint lines and seams of the dome. He felt a tug at his sleeve. Cassie wanted his attention. "Yard work isn't for everybody," Mr. LaRue was saying, "but I take pride in it. Got my lawn all finished." He gestured at a strip of green plastic that fringed the bottom of his house's red brick. "Bennett's still got his autumnDunkle, Clare B. is the author of 'Sky Inside', published 2008 under ISBN 9781416924227 and ISBN 1416924221.