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toward us. We were suddenly caught in a radiant cross fire of reflected beams bouncing off the iron lung. I had to squint. It was as if she had been swallowed by this mechanical multi-eyed bug, every bit of her except for her head and neck. She was completely enclosed in the belly of this shining, glittering creature. The shell of the beast must have measured at least ten feet long and maybe a yard wide. So after I got by the metallic body and the shock of not seeing a human one except for this weirdly disembodied head, I saw Emmett’s and my faces crowding into mirrors. There were mirrors on almost every arm of the machine, and they all seemed to be reflecting us. Some mysterious force was rotating them, turning and tracking our movements. It was like an ambush of mirrors, and we were caught in a web of reflections.
    “Hi. I’m Phyllis,” a voice said. But I wasn’t sure where it was coming from. The whooshing mechanical monster seemed to be sucking in almost every sound, swallowing up every whisper of the true wind and every birdsong from the trees. “Oh, hi.” Emmett laughed nervously. I followed where he was looking. A head with a mass of white-blond curls protruded from the opening of the glistening metal shell and rested on a pillow. A thick rubber collar encircled her neck.
    Beneath the gusty whooshing of the machine there was another sound, sharper and hissing, still a part of the monster’s breath. I felt my chest tighten as if I might have to struggle for my next breath.
    “What’s your name?” Phyllis asked. The mirrors all rotated to reflect just me.
    “G-G-Georgie . . . Georgie.”
    “And I’m Emmett,” Emmett said.
    “I know the sound of the Creature breathing sort of takes your own breath away. Don’t worry, Georgie. You can breathe fine. Just relax. Sit down. Mother, get some lemonade for them.”
    “Certainly, dear.”
    It was kind of strange when she asked her mother to do this. It wasn’t like a kid speaking to a parent, exactly. It was as if she were giving an order military style, the way one would if one were the captain of a ship or the pilot of a plane, or spaceship for that matter. This might as well have been a spaceship. She was certainly in a space that none of us had been. I noticed that although she was talking to me now, it was only Emmett’s face in her mirrors.
    “Some people, when they get around this thing, it makes them short of breath. Just remember, Georgie, you’ve got all the air in the world, the whole sky up there.” Emmett’s face slipped out of the mirrors. They mysteriously swiveled and tipped up, capturing clouds and blue sky. “I have eighty-seven cubic centimeters of air, but you have the world.”
    I wasn’t sure what she was talking about. And it wasn’t exactly the air that was getting stuck in me. It was the words. I looked hard at Phyllis. She could talk. But there was an unvarying rhythm to Phyllis’s speech. It was the rhythm of the machine. She and the machine were one. The Creature set the pace, which was always the same. Neverthless I had this sudden thought that Phyllis in a sense was a kind of stutterer, but instead of words clotting for her, it was air. Phyllis was a stutterer of air.
    For a brief time in the first grade I stuttered. I got over it very quickly, but I can still remember that there was this terrible sense of isolation because the words just dangled out there in front of me in a kind of half-light. I would reach for them, and a wind would blow them away or a shadow would pass over, and they would vanish into some dark empty place. I was always left with the horrible feeling that I would never be able to find the right word. It was a kind of death, a bunch of little deaths I suffered every day. And the loneliness was the worst part because I felt so disconnected. But, thank goodness, it ended.
    I stepped closer to the machine. There were all sorts of dials and gauges.
    “You can touch it,” she said.
    I put out my hand. It