Hall of Small Mammals by Thomas Pierce Page B

“He’s invited me to see his collection of North American beetles. He studies them. Amazing, right?”
    â€œI wonder how many of us there are in the world?” Dr. Gass asks.
    â€œAt least a thousand,” says the first one. “We should organize a party. Wouldn’t that be something?”
    Walker imagines an army of Alan Gasses. They are the building blocks of something larger and more monumental. He sips on coffee, listening to the two men compare their lives, both of them amazed that two people with the same name can have had such different experiences and opinions of the world. How did Walker end up here, in this booth, with these men? He drops a fewdollars on the table and says he must be going. Both Alans reach out to shake his hand.
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    The experiments in Europe—with the black sphere and the K-matter—have failed horribly. Claire comes home so excited she almost tackles Walker. The failure doesn’t exactly prove Daisy Theory, but the theory does emerge relatively unscathed. Particles, for the time being, can still half exist. Walker joins when her advisor takes the entire team out for celebratory drinks. In a suit jacket, jeans, and sneakers, his boyish face glowing, her advisor steadies himself on an assistant’s shoulder and steps up on a booth, raising his dark whiskey glass high. Claire lets out a whoop.
    The music in the bar is disco music: Donna Summer, maybe, but with a newer backbeat. Claire’s advisor lures a research assistant onto the dance floor. Claire lures Walker too. They dance in the middle of the group. She spins under the flashing lights. She moves away from him. The dance floor is crowded. Bodies merge and move like extensions of the same creature. Claire orbits around Walker, but when he turns she’s disappeared. He stops dancing, the only stationary body in that sea, until she reappears again, moving away from the group and toward Walker with hands raised. She’s looking right at him. Their waists meet first.
    â€œI want to take you home tonight,” he says.
    â€œWhat?”
    She can’t hear him over the music. He kisses her. Kisses are a kind of vocabulary, he thinks. This one, both lips parted, tongues touching with the most delicate of flicks, has a particular message.The message is,
Let’s be happy
, and that feels like the wise decision, a conscious decision to be happy.
    They have to leave their car at the bar that night and take a taxi home.
    â€œFun time?” he asks, but she’s already passed out against his shoulder. The last round put her over the edge.
    The taxi pulls up in front of the house, and Walker, too tired to do the math, tosses the driver a twenty before going around to the other side and helping Claire stand. He throws her arm over his neck, and they cross the dew-wet lawn together. She mumbles into his shoulder as he fumbles with the door key. Upstairs she crawls across the bed and then collapses, hair flowering out in all directions across the pillows. He unzips and tugs off her boots and lays a blanket across her back. He’s sitting on his side of the bed, untying his own shoes, when Claire says she loves him.
    â€œYou too,” he says, and shimmies out of his pants. He slides across the bed to her. Her eyes are closed, her face long and relaxed against the pillow. She may already be asleep—or on the verge of it. He considers testing her, giving her shoulder a light shake, but she looks so tired and content. Waking her wouldn’t be right.

Grasshopper Kings
    T he boy scrapes the stick across the grass a few times and flings it behind the hedge before Flynn can even get his car into the driveway. Flynn is home late from work, and driving up he saw it in the darkness, the small flame eating the end of the stick. The boy is alone on the front lawn in a red T-shirt with the sleeves cut off. He stands very still, pale arms crossed behind his