The Catcher's Dreams (FEATURED)

CHAPTER TWO - cobalt

Drake was waiting for the Ayi. She was simple enough to be a nanny, but everyone tended to call her an Ayi, which was stolen from Mandarin. It was correct enough until more came along. Then the people just stuck an s on the end, like they did to a friend to make it plural.

Thus Drake had more 'Ayis' than the typical kid at school. The one with tall bun hadn't called Drake in yet, and he wasn't going to go in unless he had to.

Instead he sat on the front steps watching the magpies hop about, glowing varying shades of greenish blue. The ants were small orbs of color, crawling through the cracks of the pavement like pieces of leftover Halloween candy. Drake looked down, blinking.

They were blurry enough already, but the glows made them even harder to see. He stepped on one, but it crawled out from under its shoe.

Its tiny glow smelled funny, like cobalt mushrooms. Drake took a deep breath and the Halloween candy stopped. The cobalt flickered, then died away. The ant collapsed. Mushrooms intensified. Shiitake mushrooms. Gross.

Drake blinked. He'd done it again. The ant lay before him, glowless. It twitched, shaking its stubby ant legs and waving its antennae, then got up again and started walking. It didn't follow its fellow ants, though, who were pouring into a small crack in the pavement. It walked off, in a perfectly straight line.

"Drake. Drake. Drake. Drake."

He turned around. The door of the house had opened, and an Ayi's face was poking out. Not the one with the tall bun as he'd expected, but the one with the loose ponytail. With slow, repeated movements of her mouth, she called out to him.

"Coming," Drake said, a word he'd learned from the kids at school to delay adults. It meant "Five more minutes".

The ant was still walking in a straight line, off the pavement and onto the road. Amid the monotonous calling of the Loose Ponytail, Drake heard the soft whoosh of a car passing. As his long, dark hair blew up in his face, the car left. A stray cat meowed at Drake and slipped through the dark metal fence across the street. He blinked his hair away. He couldn't see the ant anymore.

"Drake. Drake. Drake," the Loose Ponytail called.

He hopped up, dusted off his shorts, and ran up the doorsteps. The Loose Ponytail and all her pores were waiting for him, still repeating his name. Only when he entered the house and felt the cool bubble of indoor air poke him did the Loose Ponytail close her mouth, with all the deliberateness of a fish gulping for water. She pushed him in with one swift movement of her hand. Her hand was cold, for she was glowless. Drake had taken her glow by mistake a few weeks ago. It had come with a sweet whirl of a warm village friendship in his dreams (a surreal man, two chickens, an intricate ring, and all of twenty years' fantasies a farmer girl could pack into Drake's brief dream-filled sleep).

The house was dark, darker than usual. Drake turned on the lights and the furniture came into view. He wondered how the Ayis could work in such darkness. Loose Ponytail herself used to be so fond of artificial light. And rings. She was fond of rings. She had a collection. She used to have a collection.

The Ayis had lined up to meet Drake, as they always did. They had packed their four-person mass into the living room by the rickety piano, all standing tall and stiff, even the short ones. All glowless. Their smiles brought a rhythmic ebb to his heart. Drake counted them off. Crooked Mouth, Tall Bun, Freckles, Stiff Braid. Loose Ponytail joined them. One of them wasn't an Ayi but his aunt, but her face had faded into the crowd and he'd forgotten which one she was. All glowless, all the same. He'd told them to use English – which had suddenly turned impeccable as the air around them became clear – because he couldn't understand their dialect, but now he wanted those dialects back.

They waved all together and asked him how was school, oh wait he didn't have school, how was playing outside, what would he like for dinner. And he replied, as always, nothing much soup.

That was precisely the Ayis' cue. They led him down the three steps to the dining room, empty save for a TV and a table with three chairs. On that table, nothing much soup was displayed in all its nothing much grandeur. Drake hopped onto the chair.

It used to be uncomfortable having his nothing much soup in front of the Ayis that came to watch as soon as they lost their glows, but Drake got used to it. The TV blared incoherent Cartoon Network, drowning out all his thoughts.
The Ayis made decent nothing much soup, Drake supposed. It wasn't too salty and it wasn't too watered-down. Eating it was fairly enjoyable alongside basking in the neon light of the cartoons. But it wasn't true nothing much soup, like the kind Mama used to make.

He missed that soup with all the intensity of missing something you weren't sure had actually existed – but remembered, deep down, in the little nooks and crannies of your consciousness. He'd even made up a recipe, a sort-of recipe, one that was missing salt.

It had come in a dream, scribbled on paper. Most things for Drake tended to come in dreams, whether he could help it or not.

Mama's nothing much soup:
1 liter chicken broth
2tsp glow
3tbsp understanding
1/2 liter something else
and then she was gone.

Add salt as needed.