Page 2 of The Man Made of Smoke

“Careful getting out your side, Daniel,” my father said.

“Yeah.”

I glanced to my right.

The spaces here were narrow, and my father had parked close to the vehicle beside us. It was an old camper van. The sides were streaked withdirt, as though it had spent its long life being driven back and forth through fields without ever once being cleaned. There was a rusted metal grille screwed over the black window in the side. Staring at the glass behind it was like looking into a night sky: a kind of fathomless darkness dotted with pale, misty constellations of mold.

I edged carefully out of the car.

The space was so tight that my elbow almost touched the grimy side of the van, which made my skin crawl slightly. The vehicle seemed to tower over me, and the shadow it cast felt colder than it should. As I moved to the front, I noticed there were patterns in the dirt along the bottom of the van that looked like children’s handprints.

The metal was ticking slightly in the heat.

The four of us walked across the tarmac and into the rest area. My father bought us sandwiches from the shop and then we sat in the small area next to the arcade, Sarah and I side by side across from my mother and my father.

“Did you enjoy the zoo, Sarah?” he said.

She nodded as she ate.

“Really did, Mr. Garvie. Thank you so much.”

“Not at all. A pleasure to have you along. Right, my son?”

He looked at me. I had a mouthful of sandwich and used it as an excuse not to answer for a second.

I was thinking about what Sarah just said. Just as I had begun to think about her differently recently, I’d also started to look at her more: secretly and sideways, when she didn’t realize. Maybe I was trying to catch sight of whatever it was that was changing between us. Regardless, my gaze had kept finding her today. Sarah loved animals more than anything; she could name all the birds on the island and even identify most of the tracks we found in the woods. So I’d imagined she would love the zoo. All those exotic creatures we never dreamed we’d get to see in real life.

But while shehadseemed to be enjoying it at times, there were also moments when I’d seen her frowning a bit, a hint of sadness pinchingher face as she stared into the enclosures. I wondered now if it hadn’t been the animals she was looking at right then, but the cages.

Our friendship dictated that I should answer my father’s question by saying something sarcastic and awful about her, but instead I found myself wanting to tell her something else.

I see you, maybe.

I care.

I swallowed the food.

“Honestly?” I said. “I thought the plan was toleaveher there.”

My mother looked shocked. “Daniel!”

“What?”I raised my hands. “We all agreed. No?”

Sarah kicked me under the table.

“At least the zoo would take me,” she said. “I don’t remember them having an enclosure forrats.”

My mother shook her head.

Ten minutes later, we were done and it was time to leave. As my father took our rubbish to the bin, I thought of the journey ahead. An hour to the coast, then the ferry back to the island, and the small, ordinary world awaiting us there. It made my heart sink a little. As we walked toward the exit, I found myself dawdling behind the other three, reluctant to leave.

Ahead of me, my father looked so broad and strong. It was the opposite of how I thought of myself, but it felt like I might become that too if I tried. My mother: perhaps she would settle and stop searching for a place that could never be better, only different. And Sarah… if the words I wanted to say to her were out of reach right now, perhaps it would only be a matter of time before I found them.

For a moment, it felt like all of that was possible.

I didn’t know the termliminal spacesback then, but a part of me was already drawn to them: places that weren’t starting points or destinations, but stopgaps a step sideways from reality, like the crossing points between worlds in a fairy tale. And a part of me recognized that I was in one right then. A place where magic could happen.

I didn’t know that my mother was going to leave us before the end of the year. Or how badly my relationship with my father was about to fracture and shatter. Or that I would never tell Sarah how I felt. All I knew right then was that I didn’t want to leave here and for this moment to end.

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