Flora & Ulysses

He sat in the window of Flora’s room and looked down at the sleeping Flora and then up and out, at the lighted windows of the other houses. He thought about the words he would like to add to his poem. He thought about the music at Dr. Meescham’s house, the way the voices sounded, singing. He thought about the look on Mr. Klaus’s face when he went sailing backward down the hallway.

Was there a word for that?

Was there a word for all those things together? The lighted windows and the music and the terrified, disbelieving look on a cat’s face when he was vanquished?

The squirrel listened to the wind blowing through the leaves on the trees. He closed his eyes and imagined a giant donut with sprinkles on top of it and cream inside of it. Or jelly, maybe.

He thought about flying.

He thought about the look on Flora’s face when her mother said that life would be easier without her.

What was a squirrel supposed to do with all of these thoughts and feelings?

Flora let out a small snore.

Ulysses opened his eyes. He kept them open until the lights in the windows of the other houses went off one by one, and the world went dark except for a single streetlight at the end of the block. The streetlight fizzled into darkness and then flared back to life and then fizzled again . . . darkness; light; darkness; light.

What, Ulysses wondered, does the streetlight want to say?

He thought about William Spiver.

He thought about the word banished and the word homesick.

He imagined typing the words and watching them appear on the paper, letter by letter.

Flora had told him before she went to sleep that she thought it would be a good idea if he didn’t type anything for a while, at least not on her mother’s typewriter.

“It seems to provoke her,” she said. “I think your typing poems and flying around the kitchen kind of made her have a nervous collapse. Or something.”

She had said this, and then she had given him a sad look and closed the door to the bedroom. “I closed the door as a reminder, okay? No typewriter. No typing.”