“No, she’s not crippled.”
“What’s she look like?”
“My mother.”
Timothy’s mother was regular looking; so whatever a complex was, it had nothing to do with getting ugly. The Johnsons weren’t ugly either, but they went through what my dad called phases, which he said was all in their heads. Maybe Timothy’s aunt’s complex was like Lester Johnson’s Linda phase, but that didn’t seem right because Lester-Linda came outside all the time and Timothy’s aunt never did.
“What does she do inside all the time?”
“Works.”
I nodded, considerably wiser. The old public buildings were down in the woods with the school, mostly monuments to waste of space ever since we got our mux cable that fed into every building in the community. Most of the grown-ups stopped going to work, and they stopped coming to school on voting day, but we still had to go, and not just on voting day.
“Come on,” Timothy said.
But the smoke fascinated me. It puffed out of a silver pipe and skittered down the side of the house as if the fluffy falling snow was pushing it down. It smelled strange. I formed a snowball, a good solid one, took aim at the silver pipe, and let it fly.
“Missed by at least a kilometer,” Timothy said, scowling.
Undaunted I tried another, missed the pipe, but struck the house, which resounded with a metallic thud. I’d closed one of the house’s eyes with a white patch of snow. Timothy grinned at me, his mind tracking with mine. She’d have to come out to get the snow off the sensors. Soon we had pasted a wavy line of white spots about midway up the silver wall.
“One more on the right,” commanded Timothy. But he stopped midswing when we heard a loud whirring noise. Around the hill came a grass cutter, furiously churning snow with its blades.
“Retreat!” shouted Attila the Hun. Timothy grabbed the frozen cardboard sled.
We leaped aboard and the elephant sank to its knees. I didn’t need Timothy to tell me to run.
At the fence we threw ourselves over the frozen pickets, miraculously not getting our clothes hung up in the wires. The grass cutter whirred along the fenced perimeter, frustrated, thank goodness, by the limits of its oxide-on-sand mind.
“Ever seen what, one of those things does to a rabbit?” he asked me.
“No.”
“Cuts them up into bits of fur and guts,” Timothy said solemnly.
“Your aunt’s weird,” I said, grateful to be on the right side of the fence.
“Uh oh. You lost a glove,” Timothy said.
I nodded unhappily and turned to look over at the wrong side of the fence. Shreds of felt and wire and red nylon lay in the grass cutter’s swath.
