photo : epsos . de ( flickr . com / epsos ) fiction Boy out of Time by Lois Taylor The mysterious appearance of a boy— pumpkin head, tiny teeth, and wooden stare—may perfectly complete a family. But do children just fall out of time? WORLDLITERATURETODAY.ORG 19 W e come from people who would rather be dead than commented upon. Fred says it’s because he’s Norwegian , but I’m not, and still I like to pass unnoticed through this world. We’d accepted childlessness because we had to, until at fortythree , we had our miracle. Our Lotto Baby, Fred said. We called him Marcus, which Fred thought had dignity. I thought the world would shorten it to Mark right about the time it cut him down to size. When he started school, Marcus quickly found his place in the middle. He was slightly taller and smarter than average and just smart enough to hide it. Nothing show-offy. Nothing that teased him out from the herd. One of us. An easy boy whose only wish was for a brother. We tried to explain with a plumbing metaphor—we’d recently had a blockage in our pipes—that a brother was impossible. Marcus listened, but I don’t think he believed us for a minute. We got him a puppy instead, whom he named Baby. Funny how these things play out. Who can say if Marcus was like us because of his genes, or if he learned as he went. We were pleased with our son. Thrilled, in fact, in our own way. Until one day when I was working at home and Marcus came in with a friend. I’d assumed this was Randy, a pale-faced boy with 20 WLT NOVEMBER / DECEMBER 2015 raisin-red eyes who barely spoke but played Legos side by side with Marcus by the hour. But when I looked up, I had one of those shifts in perspective that are a glimpse of madness. That’s not Randy. Who is that? Without tearing his eyes from the Legos, Marcus said that this was Geoff. “G-E-O-F-F. He followed me home.” Geoff had small, even teeth in a head round as Charlie Brown’s. His eyes were black and blank, and there was something wooden about him. Pinocchio, I thought. And he was as still as a doorstop. Eerie calm seemed to come from him in a low hum. I asked where he lived, though I already had a hunch. “With me in my room.” Marcus’s tone was firm. That night after the boys had gone to bed in Marcus ’s bunks, Fred and I lay in the dark. The whole thing had the feel of a coup. We’d said everything we could think of and now we were silent, because all our talk—children don’t just . . . you can’t just keep him, Marcus!—hadn’t changed a thing. Geoff was still in the top bunk down the hall. Morning came anyway, and when we got up, the boys (was he a boy? well, was he?) were munching cereal and talking in this way they had, with a little explosive click like Miriam Makeba. We opted to stay home that day, close-drilling Marcus, whose answer to everything was a variation on a shrug and a dunno. Geoff, obsessed with Legos, responded with Yes, No, or I don’t remember. “He belongs somewhere,” said Fred, yet again. Three whole days spent trying to discover who was missing a boy. How could this be? Yet no one appeared to know about this boy, and the agencies you’d think would be interested referred us elsewhere. One big circle. As close as we were going to come to being explorers, this arrival of Geoff in our lives. Fred said he’d tried everything he knew, and Fred knows systems pretty well, having worked in almost every branch of government, until he found his niche in Land Use. It’s true, we’d left the police out of our search. Fred said the first thing they’d do is take him from us. Besides, we surely would have heard about a missing boy. Together...