August and Then Some by David Prete

and went back to sleep. A few nights later I heard the same scratching again. This time I knocked once: Come in. The scratching noise stopped and she gave me the four All-clear knocks. But something about it felt off. So in the morning I said, “Dani, what was going on with the scratching last night?”
    She said, “I wasn’t scratching anything.”
    â€œThen what was the noise?”
    â€œThe noise was scratching, but it wasn’t me scratching.”
    â€œThen who was it?”
    â€œMen.” She whispered this like it was her big secret.
    â€œWhat men?”
    â€œInvisible men.”
    â€œIf they’re invisible how do you know they’re men?”
    â€œOnly I can see them.”
    â€œWhat do they look like?”
    â€œThey have knives.”
    That’s when this fast chill ran up the back of me. “What do they do with them?”
    â€œThey scratch.”
    â€œWhat do they scratch?”
    â€œYou know … My bed.”
    â€œDo they scratch you?”
    â€œNo.”
    â€œLet me know if they scratch your bed again. OK?”
    â€œOK.”
    I’m guessing all kids do and say things that seem a little, you know—out there. And everyone lets it go because they’re kids. But Dani wasn’t being normal-kid kind of weird.
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    It was a finger painting. Different shades of thick red lines smeared over one another. I could see how you might think it was a horizon line at sunset. Before it was dry, Dani took something sharp, maybe the point of her pencil, and scratched lines through the paint. Now, I don’t know much about painting, but when a seven-year-old is already going for different textures, you gotta think she’s got talent. Or something to say. Or both. Mom hung what she thought was a cute little sunset picture on the refrigerator. It was her habit todisplay things that signified normal happiness. But about this sunset, she was way off.
    We were eating dinner in the dining room and Dad told me to get him another beer. OK. I go into the kitchen and open the refrigerator where this painting hung. It’d been there for a few months probably. And you know, things hang around long enough (like the Sears bullshit portraits of me wearing argyle and crooked teeth that Mom displayed on the living-room end tables) and you stop noticing them. So I grabbed the beer, shut the door, and there was this goddamn painting staring me in the face, stopping me.
    My mother hung it horizontally, but Dani’s name was written sideways, going up the page. I moved the magnets that were holding it up, put my fingers on it and spun it around vertical, so her name was at the bottom, right ways up. And that’s definitely the way it was supposed to go, man.
    You never know when you’re going to understand a little more of what’s going on inside someone. Looking at it vertically there wasn’t any sun in that picture at all, no horizon. But hundreds of unmistakable long red streaks of blood. Dani ran her finger up and down that paper with as many different shades of red as the Board of Education supplied a first-grader. Then she scratched lines into those streaks.
    I don’t know what made me run upstairs and into my sister’s room, but I stood next to her bed, my father’s beer in hand, and just looked around. Nothing was strange, nothing out of place. I didn’t know what I was looking for, when I pulled the blankets off her bed.
    Carved into the wood of her headboard, down near the mattress, were pictures of tiny girls’ bodies. Skinny legs and arms poking out of triangle dresses. Little floating stick figures without heads or faces.
    Yeah, Dani was seven, but what the fuck? I was only eleven.I went back down to the dining room, put the beer on the table in front of my dad, and he said, “You grow the wheat yourself?” He looked at me, and I fuckin looked at him, my vocal cords feeling like stone columns.
    I might