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my vision, brown, gray, silver, some almost black, their hides varied from wrinkled corrugations to perfect shining smoothness. Trembling pools of light lay across the gray-green floor. The air was a floating, silvery gray. Far off loomed the wooden mountain of a deadfall. Overhead, leafy crowns knitted together, and squirrels’ nests sat on upper branches like ragged bolls.
    Then, as if they had come into being all at once, I could see the squirrels everywhere, leaping from branches, landing on twiggy shoots, and swaying downward to rocket up again in an endless chase. Birds of all descriptions crisscrossed the gauzy air. A fox materialized within a cube of empty air, pricked up its ears, and stopped moving with one paw still raised.
    On the last Sunday before summer vacation, when coincidentally or not Canon Reed had spent the morning vainly attempting to take the sting out of Luke 12:49,
I came to cast fire upon the earth, and would have it that it were already kindled!
, I saw thefirst faint traces of the blue fire and knew that the summer would be a time of wonders.
    Intermittent, vertical strips of pale green appeared and coalesced between the more distant trees. When I came nearer, I saw that I was approaching a clearing. I reached the last of the trees. Before me was a grassy oval, unnervingly quiet. Unobstructed sun beat down upon a pad of yellow-green grasses.
    As soon as I moved out from beneath the canopy, the temperature heated up but good. I could hardly see, in all that brightness. At the center of the clearing, I sat down with my eyes just above the top of the grass. A flattened trail arrowed toward me. I wiped my forehead and blinked against the dazzle of the sun. When I breathed in, the clearing breathed with me. An electric current ran up my arms and into my chest.
    I knew awe and pleasure. I knew more was to come. Within the me within the clearing sat a me who needed time to get used to his surroundings. We sat together in our different realms and adjusted to our new conditions. There would be more, but the nature of the more could not as yet be imagined.
    A bluebird ventured out of the woods, and I tracked its arrogant, overhead loop.
    Within, my newborn self spoke, and I sent a thought flying to the bluebird. As quick as anything, that bluebird crumpled its wings and fell, lifeless as an anvil.
    On the way home, I tried to do the same to a crow sneering at me from a telephone wire, but the blasted thing refused to drop dead. So did a holstein ruminating behind a fence at the edge of the road, and I had no better luck with Sarge, an elderly police dog twitching in sleep on his owner’s front lawn. I had been given a tool that had come without an instruction manual. Thinking as a child, I assumed that installments of the instruction manual were to be steadily delivered over a reasonable time.
    Little did I know.
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    Because my board scores were surprisingly good, I wound up being accepted by all four of the colleges I applied to. As a product of foster care whose only legal parent made so little money she had never even filed with the IRS, I was offered full-tuition scholarships, free housing, and a variety of jobs at each school, so I did not have to count on Phil Grant to lay out the customary fortune. He would have refinanced his house and taken out loans to keep him in debt until retirement, if that was what I needed. That I would not be costing Phil a lot of money made me happy, but most of my happiness was relief.
    In the end, I decided on Middlemount, disappointing Phil, who had all but assumed since my acceptance at Princeton, his alma mater, that I would wind up there. I couldn’t see myself at such a high-pressure school, and I didn’t like the idea of being surrounded by a lot of rich kids. Also, although I never mentioned it during our talks over the kitchen table, I knew that in spite of all the financial aid, Princeton would take more money out of Phil’s pocket than Middlemount. On the