by Joe Baumann
One night, my sister ran inside screaming that toys were falling from the sky.
“No, really,” she said when our father went back to reading the newspaper and our mother continued stirring the spaghetti sauce. She walked to me and kicked at my leg. “Really.”
I sighed and pulled myself up and followed her outside. Because it was summer there was still light out even though it was past seven at night, and the sky was ripening into a sharp pink as the sun set. A group of half a dozen boys were clustered in our cul-de-sac, their necks craned upward. They were jostling around, spinning in slow circles like they were dizzy. When one of them pointed up the others followed his extended arm and their gazes all locked on the same place and they shuffled into a tight formation, fighting with one another for better position.
I looked up, too, from my spot on the front porch.
“Do you see it?” my sister said. She was bouncing on the balls of her feet, pointing like the boys in the street.
A small dot was growing larger, plummeting like a falling asteroid. As it got closer, its shape and color sharpened: a large, yellow stuffed bear.
“Oh, shit,” I said, watching as it dropped from the sky. The boys started shoving one another like basketball players during a free throw. One of them caught the bear and threw his elbows around, the other boys backing off. Then he tossed the bear aside, and it was only then that I noticed the other stuffed animals strewn around the street, four or five of them of different shapes, sizes, and species.
“I told you,” my sister said.
We sat down on the edge of the porch and watched. A new animal fell from the sky every five minutes or so. There was no warning and no sign of where it came from, no noise of an airplane, no thump of a helicopter’s propelling blades. Just a black speck like a flea that appeared in the sky and started to bulge and expand like a balloon, growing larger and larger, then swooping down with a delicate majesty. The boys would get excited and I could hear the shuffle of their feet and occasional yelping, but I kept my eyes on the stuffed animal as it descended, which made my eyes blur and my head feel dizzy, as if someone was holding my shoulders and rocking me in loopy, uneven circles. We made a game of it, seeing who could figure out what kind of animal it was first. As night crept up it got harder, and we had to stop, finally, when our mother poked her head out the door for the third time to beckon us to come inside for dinner. Every time the door opened we tried to get her attention, to show her that there really were toys falling from the sky, but by then it was too dark, lightning bugs coursing across the yard like loose sparks, and even the boys were misjudging where the stuffed animals were, the last ones falling to the cul-de-sac with a light thwop. Our mother snapped her finger and told us the food was getting cold.
“She’s not lying,” I said when my sister brought up the stuffed animals as soon as she scooted her chair in at the kitchen table. “I saw them.”
My mother gave me the sidelong glance she throws when she knows that someone is lying.
“Seriously. They’re just falling from the sky.”
Our father opened his beer can. “Celia, please sit still.” She was bouncing up and down, hands clutched around the sides of her chair.
“If I eat fast, can I go out and try to catch one, please?”
My mother spooned some potatoes onto her plate. “No. It’s dark outside.”
“But—”
“Celia.” My mother’s voice was strained tight like a violin string, and my sister sat still. She bowed her head and waited for our mother to say grace, and as she looked up she glanced at me, hope in her eyes. I flashed her a smile and a quick nod, and she sat back and picked up her fork.
#
The next afternoon, I stood in the cul-de-sac and stared into the sky. There was no evidence of the stuffed animals—the boys must have taken them with them—and I saw nothing in the puff of clouds or the blue of the sky to indicate where they’d come from, nor anything that made me suspect they would appear again. Celia followed me and stood by my side, craning her neck up, hair falling behind her like a horse’s mane, but she grew bored and started alternatively skipping and running in the front yard in a stretched out figure eight around the two trees on either end of the grass, murmuring something to herself about a flying princess. I stood there until one of the neighbors approached, honking at me to move.
“When do you think they’ll start falling again?” Celia said as I crossed the grass.
“I don’t know. Who knows if it’ll happen again.”
“It has to!”
I shrugged and went inside.
That evening, my sister came careening inside again, and my mother told her to stop running in the house.
“Cameron, it’s happening again! Come on!” she said, breathless, ignoring our mother.
I followed her outside, and there they were: the same cluster of boys, jostling just as the day before. Celia tugged on my arm. “Get one, please, Cameron. Won’t you go get one?”
So I trudged through the grass and stood apart from the boys. I could tell by the way they were willing to shove and elbow one another that they all knew each other, but I didn’t recognize a single one of them. Aside from a few cursory glances they ignored me, their attention on the animals falling from the sky. Two—a zebra and a giraffe—sat on the edge of the cul-de-sac opposite me, beyond the writhing boys.
“So what’s going on here?” I asked. None of them answered, because a stuffed tiger came crashing down, and the boys’ limbs were entangled as they reached up for it. They looked like crazed supplicants worshipping some sky god or destitute peasants clamoring for a few coins from a rich passer-by floating above their heads. When one of them came away with the tiger, they were all breathing heavily from their wrestling with one another. I repeated my question, louder.
One boy, the shortest, with dark hair and blurry eyes, said, “Someone’s dropping toys, duh.” He reminded me of a frog.
“Well, okay, but who’s doing it?”
“Who cares?” another one said, not bothering to look my way.
“How did you guys know this was going to happen?”
I got no answer.
Celia goaded me from the yard to catch one, but somehow the boys were sighting the speck-sized animals faster than I could, and by the time I was able to gauge where about a stuffed toy would fall the boys had created a vault-like swarm of arms and legs that I couldn’t penetrate. Despite my sister’s intermittent cries that were a mix of encouragement, annoyance, and desperation, I couldn’t bring myself to shove any of the boys out of the way; the thought of touching them made me shudder, like thinking about the sound nails make on a blackboard. When our mother called us for dinner, Celia stomped in with her arms crossed.
“I really wanted that blue flamingo,” she said, her voice quivering like she was going to cry.
“Flamingos aren’t even blue,” our mother said. “Please eat your carrots.”
“But it was really pretty!”
“Eat. Carrots.”
“Maybe you can get them to give me the flamingo, Cameron?”
Our father cleared his throat. I did not answer.
#
The next day, which was so hot the air seemed to wriggle like worms, I waited under the shade of one of the trees for the boys to appear. I was sweat-soaked and tired by the time they showed up, popping up at the end of the street like a desert mirage, sauntering in a single line, laughing at one another’s dirty jokes. I stood, brushing grass stems from my shorts—I’d been picking at them, leaving a small bald spot in the yard—and cut them off in the street.
“Hey,” I said, looking at the one I thought had caught the blue flamingo. I asked him about it. “My sister would really like it. I can give you ten bucks for it.” I fished the money from my pocket to show him I was serious.
“Sorry, kid,” he said, glancing at his friends, who wouldn’t meet my gaze. I couldn’t tell if he was nervous or mocking me. “I don’t have it.”
“Well, which of you does?”
“None of us.”
“I saw you guys take it with you. The blue flamingo?”
“No, man, you don’t get it,” frog voice said. “They disappear.”
“What?”
“After we go to sleep, the animals all disappear. Why do you think we keep coming back?”
I bit my cheek and clenched my fists. “Come on, guys. Don’t be jerks.”
“We’re serious. Come on, we’ll prove it.”
#
The boys were right. They handed me the first animal that fell from the sky, a pink hippopotamus, and told me to put it somewhere in my bedroom. I did what they said, my sister following me around the house like a starved puppy, begging me to let her have the toy. Our mother clucked at me to just give her the damn thing, wasn’t I too old for stuffed animals anyway? When I tried to explain to her what the boys had said she sighed, pinched the bridge of her nose like it was bleeding, and waved me away.
Celia clenched her fists. “Come on, Cameron, please. You don’t even like pink.”
“I’m doing an experiment,” I said.
“What kind of experiment?”
“You wouldn’t understand.”
She stomped away, called by our mother to brush her teeth and put on her pajamas. I set the hippopotamus on top of my bureau, aimed it so it stared at me and we could watch each other. I had trouble sleeping. I couldn’t ignore the feeling that the hippo was glaring, alive, squinting toward my skull if I rolled away from it. I finally had to get up and turn it sideways so it wasn’t looking in my direction. When I did eventually fall asleep, I dreamt that I was at a carnival and that catching stuffed animals tumbling out of the sky was a game. But I had to use a pillowcase, and my pillowcase was too small to hold most of the overstuffed animals. The boys I was competing with had thought of this and equipped themselves with black trash bags that puffed up like cooked popcorn when the breeze caught their open mouths. When the referee—there was a referee, wearing a pink-and-white striped shirt—blew his whistle, I’d caught only one animal: the hippopotamus sitting on my bureau. But when I went to reach into my bag to claim it, the hippo was gone.
Which was when I woke up, sunlight filtering through the half-open blinds. I looked up, and, of course: the hippo had disappeared. At first I thought Celia had snuck in and stolen it, or my father, playing some kind of prank, had moved it, but my bedroom door was still locked. The thing was gone.
Celia didn’t believe me, and she threw a tantrum, going so far as to call me a liar and start crying, stomping around the house. My mother glared at me. I shrugged.
“I’m not lying. It really disappeared. You can check my room if you want. Both of you.” Celia took me up on the offer, rifling through my things with such anger and unconcern for my possessions that I had to lift her by the waist and plop her in the hallway to get her to stop. Her face was a blanched red color, her skin shiny from crying.
“Just get her one, Cameron,” was all my mother said, wiping her hands on a dish cloth.
#
The animals fell for the rest of summer and into fall, and the same group of boys appeared on our street every afternoon to catch them. Once school started again the cluster expanded as the boys told their friends, and soon enough there were almost twenty of them milling in a circle of skinny limbs waiting for the animals to drop. At Celia’s insistence, and my mother’s grimacing look that told me it was somehow my job to temper that insistence, I tried to edge my way into the group, but I was an eternal outsider, forced to the edge of the circle. On occasion a stuffed animal would fall in my direction and I managed to box out the other boys and claim it, then hand it over to my sister. She would clutch it to her chest and look up at me.
“Do you think this one will stay?” she asked every time.
Our parents finally accepted what was happening after the third stuffed animal disappeared. Every time, Celia would screech that the toy was gone, waking everyone up well before any alarms went off. I could never tell if she was excited by this fantastical mechanism of the falling animals or distraught over her loss. She had named them, after all; she called them her sisters.
Then Celia got sick, and everything changed.
#
It began with Celia’s complaints of being tired and feeling weak, which both our mother and father first thought were just her wish to skip school, a trick she had tried more than once the year before. But then she was sent home because of how much she was complaining of feeling sluggish and fatigued. When she developed the cough that didn’t go away for weeks, and had trouble getting out of bed to go to the bathroom, our parents finally caved and took her to the doctor.
The blood tests and biopsy confirmed the worst fears my mother fretted about, her voice shaky, hands busying dishtowels or ink pens. I went with them for the results, and while we sat in the waiting room my mother paced back and forth, wringing her hands like they were wet.
“Jill,” my father said, leaning forward and placing a hand on her hip when she was close enough. She stopped and looked down at him. I watched them stare at each other. Celia was clutching a doll, watching as well. For a moment we were all frozen, and I thought we might stay that way if a nurse hadn’t called our name. All of our heads snapped in the woman’s direction except Celia’s, who was busy with the doll, which she had laid on her pressed-together legs. She was smoothing out its hair, draping it over her knees.
After putting Celia to bed that night, my mother sat my father and I down at the kitchen table and told us with a hardness like diamonds in her voice that we were not going to be the leukemia family. She would discreetly tell Celia’s teachers and my grandmother, but that was it. We were not, she insisted, a charity case. She stared at me, and I swallowed hard. I wanted to say that people would figure it out, that Celia’s absence would raise eyebrows, and that wouldn’t it become clear that something was going on when she started losing her hair?
“Sick kids lose their hair, don’t they?” I looked at my father.
“Then we’ll get her a wig,” my mother said, flattening a tuft of her own wily hair.
#
The days were getting shorter, the sky more often bruised pre-dawn blue than not when I woke, and it was around then that the animals stopped falling. Celia asked about them, her voice strained, wanting me to catch one for her.
“I know it will just disappear,” she huffed. “But it’s nice while they last.” Her eyes had taken on a sunken quality that made her look skeletal.
I wrapped myself in a scarf and coat after school and waited on the porch until the light seeped away, offering up a silent prayer to whoever or whatever had been responsible for the animals, but no matter how desperately I wished, my jaw clenched to the point that it ached so much I could barely chew my dinner, no animals fell. The boys had stopped coming the very day the toys stopped showering down as if they somehow knew, and I didn’t see them ever again. Then the first snowfall came, and I knew the stuffed animals were gone forever. It wasn’t a hunch or a worry. It was a fact, settling in my brain like a slug.
Celia seemed to know, too. She reached out for my hand when I went to tell her. Her room had taken on an antiseptic smell. Her treatment had amplified, but she was at a stalemate: her condition wasn’t worse, but it wasn’t better. She didn’t need to be hospitalized, not yet, but she was also not well enough to go to school.
“It’s okay,” she said, her hand cold on my arm. “It’s not your fault.”
She took a nose dive. My mother found Celia so weak she was unable to speak; doctors said her white blood cell count had plummeted, and that she was no longer healthy enough to stay at home. We kept her bedroom door shut so that no one had to walk past that unoccupied space. My mother didn’t even bother to make the bed after my father peeled Celia from between its sheets, wrapping her up in his arms and hauling her to the car. We hit a patch of ice on the way to the hospital, the car fishtailing just so into a small snow bank.
“Jesus, Frank. Be careful.”
No one was hurt.
When I visited Celia after school, she asked me to tell her stories.
“About the animals,” she said when I wondered what she wanted me to tell her about.
“What animals?”
She frowned and puffed her lips like I was a moron. It was a brief blink of the not-sick Celia shining through her illness like a short squint of sunburst between rain clouds. I wanted to grab her face and hold it that way, take a photograph, remember what the twist of her skin felt like in that position so that I could bend her lips and ply her forehead to bring it back whenever I wanted. But as quickly as that grimace had appeared it was gone, erased like blustered sand.
“The sky animals, you dope.”
“Oh.”
“What do you think blue flamingo was named? Did he have a house?”
“His name was Fred and he lived in a mansion shaped like a giant shrimp, because that’s what flamingos eat.”
“Where do you think he went? And what about Bob? I called your hippo Bob. You remember the hippo? The pink one?”
I told her that of course I did, and I wasn’t sure where they went, but that if I had to guess, he’d snuck out the back door and grown wings, flying back up to wherever it is he came from.
“Do you think they came from heaven?” Celia asked.
“Maybe they did,” I said.
“Do you think I’ll see them if I go there?”
Which made my mouth go dry, and my jaw fill with rust, and thankfully my father walked in with a smuggled-in carton of chocolate ice cream, for which Celia screamed with joy, and forgot about her question and the fact that I gave her no answer.
#
It wasn’t until our neighbor Mr. Carthage rang the doorbell and thrust a green stuffed monkey into my arms that I found out that the toys were falling again. After all, it had been Celia, not me, who’d discovered them in the first place and kept an eye out, squinting out her bedroom window like a child waiting for a chance to glimpse Santa Claus on Christmas Eve. Mr. Carthage was bald, which reminded me of Celia. Unlike my home room teacher who still had a strip of brown hair that banded his head like a crown of laurel, Mr. Carthage’s head was a pink dome, shaved totally bare. He had lumps on top, as though he’d smashed his head against a beam.
“Is this yours?”
“No,” I said.
“It was in the street.”
“Oh.” I looked past Mr. Carthage, wondering if the boys were back. The street was empty.
“Someone might run it over, but it looks pretty clean.”
“Okay.”
“Give it to your sister. How is she, by the way?”
I shrugged. “It’s hard to say, I guess. I’m kind of out of the loop. I think that no one thinks I can handle knowing.”
Mr. Carthage half-smiled, the kind of lopsided look people get when they don’t know what else to say but know they’re supposed to say something.
“Thanks,” I said. “I’ll give it to her.”
Behind Mr. Carthage, another animal thumped into the street.
#
I set the monkey on Celia’s unattended bureau and then had trouble sleeping that night, which wasn’t unusual. My parents were spending long stretches at the hospital with Celia, but they had long insisted that I needed to be getting sleep and finishing homework. I was old enough, my father finally convinced my mother, that I could be alone in the house without burning it down or impaling myself on something. I often found myself still alone when I went to bed, though I rarely fell asleep before I heard the garage door moaning open when at least one of my parents—usually my father—finally came home to catch a few hours of sleep before trudging to work the next day after dumping me at school.
But something was different tonight. I kept hearing noise outside and, finally, when my legs were restless and I couldn’t take the steady rhythmic sound of whatever it was, I went to the window.
At that exact moment, the headlights of my parents’ car lit up the cul-de-sac and, in the process, illuminated the massive pile of stuffed animals, ridged like a snow bank, covering the street.
I ran outside to get a better look and was met by a blast of cold air; it was early March, and the days were getting warmer but after dark the temperature dipped like a valley, curling close to freezing, but I ignored the cold and the dewiness of the grass as I crossed the yard, my feet growing slick and slimy.
I barely registered my mother’s voice: “Cameron, what are you—holy shit.”
The animals were still falling, like snowflakes, peppering the street in high mounds, the whole thing reminding me of a massive crane game, the cul-de-sac the glass enclosure. Limbs were entangled, heads squashed together, animals interlocked with one another like loosely-fitting puzzle pieces. When I reached the street I didn’t stop; in one quick motion I stepped into them like I was a small child again and was smashing into my first large pile of leaves or snow. The animals held me, clung to me as if they were alive, and I let myself sink into them. The coldness in my feet seeped away, whisked off my skin and into their porous surfaces. My whole body felt soothed. I felt like they were carrying me.
I knew I should have been asking about my sister. I knew I should be listening to my mother’s yelps, her cries wondering where I was. Her voice was cracking in the darkness. Through the spaces between the animals I could see one and then another neighbor’s porch lights snapping on, and soon doors would open and everyone on our street would see the rain of animals, and it would no longer be mine and only mine, so I ignored my mother. I ignored everything, and I sunk to the bottom of that pile, because there was no where else I wanted to be.
Joe Baumann’s fiction and essays have appeared in Tulane Review, Willow Review, Hawai’i Review, SNReview, Lindenwood Review, and many others. He is the author of Ivory Children, published in 2013 by Red Bird Chapbooks.He possesses a PhD in English from the University of Louisiana-Lafayette and teaches composition, creative writing, and literature at St. Charles Community College in Cottleville, Missouri. He was recently nominated for two Pushcart Prizes and for inclusion in Best American Short Stories 2016.