I

On a dreary autumn afternoon, a young woman named Ezmeralda Totkins was chopping a carrot at her kitchen table when a whoop from outside caused her to glance up and witness, through the steam-rimmed windowpane, a miracle. Her son, Wilburn, was flying.

It had been a pretty ordinary day up to that point: cloudy, a bit damp—perfect soup weather, she’d thought. And soup seemed a prudent option since Gramma Fark would be visiting for supper and the older woman never missed a chance to critique Ez’s cooking—nor indeed, any aspect of her homemaking, nor even Ez’s character in general. Nothing brought Gramma to life more than spotlighting her not-daughter-in-law’s every insufficiency. Ez wished she could forgive her for it. The unfortunate fact of the matter, though, was that Gramma’s cooking was the stuff of legend, whereas Ez’s... well...

But this time Ez was determined not to give Gramma an excuse to feel superior. So soup: because regardless of the weather, soup was difficult to ruin, and nigh on impossible to burn. So Ez had filled her cauldron from the rain barrel and hung it on the pot crane and swiveled it over the fire. Then she’d sent Wilburn outside to dig potatoes in the garden while she buckled down to chopping. And now...

Her son was turning cartwheels in midair.

The knife slid from Ez’s fingers with a clatter. She sat frozen, her brain seeming to have jammed. It was just... happening. Her mind tried to reject what her eyes stubbornly refused to quit seeing.

Ez slapped herself hard across the face. It hurt—enough to blur the miracle with tears, but not erase it. But this couldn’t be real life. It was a dream. It had to be. Ez drew back her hand and slapped herself again as hard as she could, knocking herself out of her chair.

There was no denying that pain. Even Ez’s palm stung from the blow. Cursing, she dragged herself upright in time to see Wilburn pause, some thirty feet above the garden. For a moment, the boy hung motionless, a small, dark figure in the ashen sky. The way he cocked his head told Ez he’d just had an idea. Suddenly, Wilburn clamped his arms to his sides and shot straight upward like an arrow, vanishing beyond the window frame. Ez blinked once at the empty rectangle. Then with a yelp she bolted for the door, hip-checking the table in her haste and sending vegetables cascading to the floor. She dashed outside without putting her boots on, jumped the garden fence and sprinted to the spot beneath which Wilburn had ascended.

He was gone. Ez stood there in the cold mud gazing up into the clouds for what felt like a quarter of an hour. It hadn’t happened, she decided at last. What she’d seen out the window had been a large bird, that was all. A very large, perfectly ordinary bird, and somehow, a trick of the light... Perhaps she needed to start getting more rest. As for Wilburn, he had probably wandered off to look for toads down by the creek. Yes, that would be it. The silly boy—Didn’t he know it was too cold out for amphibians?

The shovel and the gunnysack lay next to the potato patch where Wilburn had abandoned them. When he got back, Ez would have to pretend to be cross with him. Where are my spuds? she’d ask in her stern voice. Oops, he would say, I kind of forgot. Then she would write out a few math problems on the slate board and give Wilburn the chalk, and he would take it as if it were a whip with which to flog himself.

Ez smiled as she squelched over in her socks to complete the chore her son hadn’t quite gotten around to starting. Wilburn hated math, which was precisely what made it the perfect punishment. After all, the whole point was to teach the boy a lesson: So why not teach two at once? It was a strategy Ez’s own parents had applied to great effect in raising her, and she knew Wilburn would thank her for it one day, just as she’d eventually thanked them. She stooped to grab the shovel.

“HEY MOM—WATCH THIS!”

Her neck jerked back. Hundreds of feet above, Wilburn came hurtling out of the clouds head first. He dived so fast that a vortex of mist was sucked into his wake. The sound of his clothing snapping in the wind was like a drumroll. From Ez’s perspective, he went from a distant speck to a full-sized boy in a heartbeat.

She reached, instinctively, to catch him: a foolhardy move, for if he had really been falling, she would have been flattened like a shadow at noon. But of course, Wilburn wasn’t falling—he was flying.

Ez screamed as he pulled out of his dive, inches from smashing into her. For a fraction of a second they came nose to nose, she looking straight up, he straight down, her face contorted in horror, his radiant with joy. Wilburn was soaking wet from flying through the clouds. His cheeks were flushed and his dark hair was plastered flat against his skull with speed—and he was laughing, laughing with the purest, most beautiful delight.

Then he slingshotted upward, gusting Ez with wind and pelting her with droplets of water. He whipped around in a gigantic loop-the-loop, one, two, three times. It was impossible. It was obscene. The laws of physics... wadded up and tossed over God’s shoulder like a bad sketch.

Ez fell to her knees in the mud. All her life she’d had a feeling, deep down, that she’d never fully been aware of before, a sense of confidence that although she didn’t and obviously couldn’t know everything, she at least basically grasped the situation—the situation being life... the world... reality. Her every belief depended on that fundamental confidence, which she now noticed for the first time, as it buckled beneath the weight of mounting evidence—and gave. It was like a pane of glass shattering in her mind.Ez burst out laughing. It was just too perfect. The punchline to the cosmic joke. She threw back her head and opened her arms in surrender, helplessly laughing to the sky—getting it. Everything she’d thought she’d known was wrong. It was a miracle. It was the funniest prank every ever pulled. She laughed herself hoarse, kneeling in the mud, because—What else was there to do?

After a while, the effects of her epiphany began to fade, leaving her wracked by a severe case of the hiccups. At least she was able to think normally again. Well, almost normally.

She clapped for Wilburn as he showed off every stunt that he could think of, zigging, zagging, corkscrewing, somersaulting, stopping on a dime and changing course as effortlessly as Ez could wave her hand. He made it look so easy. And... all bets were off at this point... so... Why not? Ez leapt into the air.

She landed. Well, it had been worth a try. For half a second she had honestly believed she was about to soar up to join Wilburn in the sky. The longer she watched him, the more she found herself growing accustomed to the spectacle. Once she had gotten over the initial existential shock and satisfied herself that Wilburn was not in any immediate danger, she began to wonder if she might not as well go ahead and dig the potatoes. Unless such things as soup and supper didn’t matter anymore...? She wasn’t sure. But she was getting restless simply standing there, miracle or no, so she picked up the shovel and began to dig.

Every other second, she glanced up to check on Wilburn, which her neck did not appreciate. Before long, it hurt nastily, as if a bigger and bigger snake was biting her at the base of her skull. But she kept doing it, for the same reason that she didn’t go back to put her boots on: as sole witness to the miracle, Ez felt it was her duty to, well, witness—and she had a funny feeling that if she turned her back for more than a second, something horrible would happen.

But when she’d dug ten times more potatoes than she needed for the soup and the gunnysack was full to the point of bursting, Ez was forced to consider the possibility that the miracle might last for days or weeks on end—or forever. There was but one way to find out, and in the meantime, they would surely need to eat... Wouldn’t they?

The only thing Ez knew for certain was that she didn’t know anything anymore. But on the other hand, apart from the fact that Wilburn was flying, the world seemed to be behaving itself normally. And, she mused, it would take more than a miracle to alter Gramma Fark’s plans. That settled the matter.

Ez began to wrestle the sack of spuds across the garden. It was so heavy she could barely pick it up and had to transport it in lurches, hoisting and swinging it a few feet at a time to avoid blowing her back out. The process took her several minutes, during which she barely kept track of her son’s location out of the corner of her eye.

It wasn’t until she got to the gate and straightened up to catch her breath that she noticed something was amiss. Wilburn was flying sluggishly, as if the air around him had turned thick as syrup. Ez mistook it for another game at first. Wilburn would launch himself upward and slowly coast to a halt, then drift back downward and do it again. She grew concerned, however, as his coordination began to deteriorate. Wilburn had flown a ways beyond the garden, out over the valley that separated the hill on which the cottage sat from the next one. He was too far off for Ez to see his face, but his slumped posture was plainly that of a boy exhausted, yet unwilling to give up his fun. Cupping her hands around her mouth, Ez shouted, “Hey! Come take a break!”

Wilburn heard, and reluctantly turned back, beginning to descend on a diagonal trajectory. But his head was bobbing woozily, his shoulders sagging; and his limbs were dangling slackly. Fear spiked through Ez as he drew near enough for her to make out his expression: it was the one he always got when she let him stay up past his bedtime. How could the boy feel drowsy with a hundred feet of nothing between him and the ground? Yet that clearly was the case. Wilburn’s descent was growing clumsier by the second.

Then without warning he plummeted five dozen feet, caught himself with a jolt, and floated, swaying like a drunkard, still much, much too high for comfort. Then he went limp. And just like that, the miracle turned into a catastrophe. A scream that could have drawn blood tore from Ez’s throat as her son dropped out of the sky.

II

It would have been the end of Wilburn Totkins Fark had not his jacket snagged on the very branch of the old sycamore Ez had been planning to chop off for fear that it would break during a storm and hit the cottage. The branch absorbed Wilburn’s momentum with a groan, the stiff wood flexing to its limit. It bowed steeply, then sprang back, launching him upward in arc. He tumbled bonelessly through the air and landed hard on the cottage’s red roof.

The thud his body made was the most terrifying sound Ez had ever heard. What she did next was only natural: she panicked. She crashed through the garden gate and sprinted a full circle around the cottage, yelling Wilburn’s name. When he failed to answer, she clawed her way up the old tree and hurled herself onto the roof—a feat she wouldn’t have believed herself capable of had she paused to consider it.

The boy lay in a heap on the red shingles. Ez crawled to his side and ran a hand over his forehead, brushing back his windswept hair. His lips were blue, and his skin icy to the touch. But he was breathing. Ez checked him over thoroughly for injuries and found nothing worse than a few abrasions. That didn’t rule out internal damage, though...

She hesitated, glancing at the old sycamore, then at the chimney, then at the rain gutters, then back to the tree. Risking her own hide was one thing, but Wilburn’s was quite another. How the hell was she supposed to get him down gently? Even a ladder would be risky.

The solution came to her in a flash. Ez climbed down hastily and ran into the cottage. Snatching the slate board off the mantle, she feverishly scratched out an equation, then drew a rough diagram of the contraption she intended to build. A childhood’s worth of math punishments had not been wasted on her: Ez had almost been an engineer. She would have made a stellar one, she knew, if only certain unforeseen events had not transpired...

Ez dashed around the cottage gathering the items she would need: her toolbox, her rolling pin, the folding cot she kept for guests, a coil of rope. She threw it all into the wheelbarrow and drove it to the base of the tree, then flipped the wheelbarrow over and unbolted the axle from the chassis. Minutes later, she stood on the cot and hauled the rope hand over hand, hoisting herself up to the roof using a block and tackle system she’d rigged with the wheel and the rolling pin as pulleys. It was a crude job, of which Ez would have been embarrassed under ordinary circumstances, but for this it proved sufficient.

Tying the rope off on the weather vane, she bundled her unconscious son onto the cot with as little jostling as possible, then braced herself against the chimney and, letting the rope out inch by inch, lowered him smoothly to the ground. He weighed much less than the potatoes. Once down, Ez was able to pick up the cot and carry it inside with Wilburn on it. She set it down beside the fire, threw more wood on, and carefully removed Wilburn's wet jacket, which had torn so badly that she scarcely needed to move him, before wrapping him up snugly in a quilt.

Time passed. Ez perched tensely on the edge of her seat, peering into Wilburn’s face, matching her breathing to the gentle rise and fall of his chest. Gradually, his color returned. And then his nose began to twitch. And at long last his eyes flipped open and he sat up. Wilburn had inherited his father Jack’s eyes, which were so brown as to look black, yet somehow full of inner brightness.

“G’morning,” Wilburn mumbled, stretching. He sniffed the air with interest. He drew a hand out from beneath the quilt and pointed to the cauldron. “Soup?” he asked.

“Not yet,” Ez said, grinning with relief. “Just broth. Would you like some?”

“Yeah! I mean... Yes please.” Wilburn leaned forward eagerly. Then his gaze became distant. “I forgot the potatoes,” he said. He frowned. “No, wait, I went out there to do it... I was just about to start... But then I thought—” He sprang up suddenly, causing Ez to flinch back in surprise.

“Mom—guess what—I can fly!”

Before Ez had a chance to get a word out, Wilburn bounded into the air. He got only a few feet off the floorboards before running out of steam. He hovered for a second, the enthusiasm draining from his face. Then he collapsed back onto the cot looking like he might throw up.

“Oh... I don’t feel so good...” He tugged the quilt around himself again, shivering.

Ez quickly ladled broth into a bowl and smeared butter on a chunk of bread to go with it. To her immense relief, Wilburn ate ravenously. She kept refilling his bowl and getting up to fetch more bread until he finally clasped his hands over his bulging belly and let out an enormous yawn. With that, he fell promptly back to sleep.

Ez studied him intently for some minutes longer before forcing her attention to the soup—or rather, the lack thereof. With a sinking feeling, she looked from the table, on which half the vegetables still waited to be chopped, to the floor, where much of what she’d managed to chop earlier was strewn, to the window, through which the light had already begun to fade. Then she spotted the gunnysack full of potatoes leaning by the garden gate, as yet unwashed and unpeeled. She wanted to cry.

But damn it, Gramma Fark wouldn’t be crying if she’d been in Ez’s shoes. Or, well, muddy socks. And crying was exactly what the woman Gramma thought Ez was would do. That woman was weak, but the real Ez was tough, or so she told herself. She wouldn’t let Gramma be right about her.

Ez sprang into action. There was no time to brew coffee, so she choked down a spoonful of dry grounds before attacking the vegetables in a frenzy. Precision was, unfortunately, out of the question. Ez took barely enough care to ensure she didn’t cut her fingers off. She dumped the whole mess in the cauldron and gave it a perfunctory stir. Then, imagining the snide remarks Gramma was going to make, she tore into the cleaning.

This required her to finally take off her now-ragged socks in order to stop tracking muddy footprints, of which there were already a dismaying plenty. Wilburn slept right through the racket Ez made rushing about scrubbing and dusting. Not even when she dropped the empty tea kettle with a resounding clang did the boy stir. Shaking her head, Ez hurried out into the dusk to fill the kettle from the rain barrel.

As she was coming back she thought she heard something: a distant humming, which of course must be the wind. Except... no wind was blowing. The note droned on and on, unnaturally steady; and it was steadily becoming louder, unless that was her imagination. There was daylight enough for her to see across the hilltops a few miles in all directions. What she saw was—nothing. Not a flicker of motion. Only hills and valleys stretching into darkness.

Feeling jumpy, Ez went back inside to light the lamps and set the table, put the kettle on the hearth and give the soup another stir. Looking around, she was startled to discover she’d completed every task she’d meant to; rather shabbily, yes, but still, done was preferable to not. The last thing left to tidy was herself.

There were only two rooms in the cottage: Ez's bedroom, to which she now retired, and the everything-else room. The loft served as Wilburn’s quarters, though he often crawled in with Ez late at night, claiming he’d had a nightmare. Ez never challenged this pretense, which she was pretty sure was false at least nineteen times out of twenty. She knew Wilburn would grow out of it one day, and... well, the cottage could be a lonely place at night, or really any time, isolated as it was amidst the windswept hills. Every brick of it, every nail in every plank was haunted by the ghost of Jack. His absence defined Ez’s world, even now: more than seven years after his death. Living in the cottage they had built together, raising the child they had made together... It was everything the two of them had wanted—together—But one of them was missing.

Ez peered at herself in the dressing-table mirror. A small part of her was always surprised to see how young she looked; and today more so than ever, for she felt as if she’d aged a decade in the past few hours. Her reflection was a good reminder that she wasn’t an old widow like Gramma Fark yet. She was still twenty-seven, and in fact not even technically a widow, because she and Jack had only ever been engaged. That was her biggest regret: that she had put off marrying the man she loved for reasons that seemed utterly trivial in hindsight. She’d planned to marry him eventually, expecting there to be more time... so much more, years and decades. And of course, there had been time, and there still was—for her.

There wasn’t so much as a speck of gray in Ez’s sandy brown hair, although she did brush out a twig from the old sycamore. No mark of the day’s misadventures showed on her face either, unless it was a certain... strangeness in her bottle-green eyes. Ez’s clothing was a sadder story. Between the digging and the climbing, she’d made quite a bit of mending work for herself, not to mention washing. But that could all wait for tomorrow.

Ez changed into a clean pair of trousers and a baggy flannel shirt that had been Jack’s. As she was buttoning it, she became aware of that strange buzzing noise again. It had grown loud enough to hear it through the walls now. Or was it... ? She looked up, wincing at the resurgent twinge in her neck. The noise was coming through the roof all right, which meant whatever was making it must be above the cottage, which meant it was... flying. A giddy sort of dread began to boil in her stomach.

Ez hurried from her bedroom, past the sleeping Wilburn to the door, and locked it. Then she went around locking all the windows and drawing the curtains shut. She could feel the vibration through the floorboards now. The humming grew louder, and still louder, until, for the second time that day, something landed on the roof.

The thunk it made roused Wilburn from his slumber. Another thunk followed the first. And then another, and the buzzing ceased. In the relative silence, Ez and Wilburn stared into the rafters. They could hear whatever it was scratching around above them. A cacophony of clicks and skitters filtered down, as if a squirrel-circus was performing on the shingles.

“She’s here,” Wilburn said blankly.

“What?” Ez asked. “Who?”

But before Wilburn could answer there was an almighty crash. Debris rained down into the cottage as a creature from a nightmare tore its way inside. The monster wriggled through the hole it had made and scuttled upside down across the ceiling with appalling speed. The firelight flashed iridescent off its wings. Ez gasped. It was a hornet the size of a cart horse, poison yellow with black stripes. Two more identical monstrosities came squirming through the hole after the first one. Their stench, like overripe fruit mixed with carrion, triggered a primordial hatred in Ez, a revulsion that ran deeper than her horror.

The knife she had been using to chop vegetables was in her hand again without her meaning to have snatched it off the drying rack. She shoved Wilburn behind her as the hornets dropped from the ceiling to the floor. They couldn’t spread their wings in the cramped confines of the cottage, but they didn’t need to. The humans were trapped. The giant insects pressed in from three sides, backing Ez and Wilburn toward the fire.

III

Ez brandished the knife, its handle slick with sweat. She could feel the heat from the fire scalding the backs of her legs. The hornets advanced slowly, their antennae waggling. Then, as if some signal had been given, all three pounced on Ez at once.

She might have stood a chance if she’d been armed with her bow at a distance. As it was, only dumb luck saved her from decapitation. She slashed wildly, the knife glancing off a hornet’s armor at the same moment it knocked her feet out from beneath her. A second hornet struck her squarely between the shoulder blades with a leg as hard as a fencepost, flipping her end over end, and the third hornet’s mandibles snapped shut in the empty space, exactly where her head had been a millisecond earlier.

Ez slammed to the floor. Dazed, she rolled onto her back and saw her own frightened reflection, multiplied hundreds of thousands of times over in a pair of compound eyes the size of watermelons. Her hand was in the hornet's blind spot. Without thinking, Ez buried her knife in the gap between its head and thoracic armor. The monster jerked away, unpinning her, but shearing the blade cleanly off its handle in the process. Ez scrambled to her feet and dealt the creature a ferocious kick that sent it crashing into the table, launching dinnerware in all directions. The hornet lay writhing where it had fallen, unable to rise.

Ez spun around to find the other two descending upon Wilburn, who had seized the fire poker and was wielding it like a sword. He managed to land a satisfying smack, but for all the effect it had, he might as well have been beating a rock. The axe Ez used for log-splitting was leaning in the corner. In a single motion she grabbed hold of it and swung, bringing it down with a wet crunch that clove a hornet’s head in two. The final hornet whipped around, slapping Ez with its abdomen and hurling her against the wall. Her vision flashed.

She slid to the floor and must have blacked out for a second, for the next thing she saw was the poker sailing out of Wilburn’s grasp. It spun through the air and landed with a clatter, out of reach. Wilburn stumbled backward, his face shocked and hopeless; he could not retreat further without stepping in the fireplace.

Thrumming its triumph, the hornet reared up on hind legs, its abdomen quivering grotesquely as a drop of violet venom oozed from the tip of its dagger-sized stinger. Ez dove, knowing it was too late, her final prayer that she might take the sting herself, buying Wilburn a chance to flee.

It all happened in an instant. Just as the hornet struck, the cottage's front door was blasted off its hinges; it came wizzing through the air, missing Ez by a whisker, and slapped flat against the floor—directly on top of the hornet. The effect was like that of a boot stomping a jelly donut. Green slime splattered everything within a ten-foot radius, dousing the fire and drenching Ez and Wilburn.

There followed a moment of profoundest shock, during which the only sound was the drip-drip of bug guts raining from the ceiling. Then, in unison, mother and son turned to the open doorway, where stood a most familiar stoop-shouldered figure. Gramma Fark shrugged off her traveling cloak and folded it neatly over one arm before stepping across the threshold. She surveyed the destruction with her usual pursed-lipped expression of maternal disapproval. Then she clucked her tongue and shook her head the way she always did and said, “Well, this is a fine how-do-you-do.”