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drawn on the piece of construction paper reappeared in his mind, the giant box like the coat closet. The flying creatures had been there, too, swarming in the sky above it. And there was the matter of the voice he’d heard that day. If he went back inside the coat closet, would he hear the voice again? Would he have more time to figure out whether the voice was really there and whether the voice knew anything about the place he drew in the picture? Maybe if he got close enough to it, he’d be able to understand. “Come here,” the voice had said. What did that mean?
    Air had limitations. Like the frozen things in the refrigerator that were too hard and stuck together to take apart. The extra peanut butter he wanted but couldn’t have. The milk he wasn’t allowed to drink because of the craze that came over him when he did so. The dancing blue flame that lived on top of the kitchen stove he was not permitted to touch, to play with. The static in the television he couldn’t pick up and hold (the screen kept getting in the way). Then there was the matter of the holes that he would never be able to explore because they were too small to fit him: the garbage disposal, the sink drain, the washing machine, that tunnel at the bottom of the toilet bowl, the air-duct vent, the little place where the pencils went into the sharpener. And worst of all, the locks on the medicine cabinet that kept trying to stop him from rescuing the boxes. There was always something standing in his way in the Land of Air. And now there was this voice in the clutter of this world to also decipher.
    Sephiri finished with the step counting and headed downstairs to the living room. A nightlight extended from an electrical socket. It looked like the flashlight of the anglerfish in the depths of Water, only dimmer. The curtains were drawn like huge blankets over the windows. He avoided the sofa, because to sit on it was to be enveloped, pulled down to the unknown depths of its brownish bulkiness to be caught by some long-fingered monster that lived inside. The man called Manden sat on the sofa a few times, and the sofa never got him. Nor did it ever bother his mother. Why? Sephiri wondered.
    He didn’t linger on the thought, because now the green carpet looked different without the lights on. He became frightened, and in his excitement, he couldn’t remember where the light switch was. It wasn’t the dark that worried him. It was the fear that something was different in the dark. In his mind, day things needed to stay day things and not change in the night. They ought not try to become something else. Without the lights, he couldn’t see the legions of carpet fibers waving, a comforting reminder of the seaweed that grew where his friends lived.
    In the dark, the carpet looked like that enormous bog with the bestial amphibians—just like the ones in his picture books—waiting in the murk to grab him, beings that didn’t seem to belong to the Land of Air or the World of Water. In those first minutes when he was climbing into his boat to sail away from his troubles, they would watch him float off with ominous eyes. “Where do you think you’re going?” the cricket frogs would say. The mudpuppies and hellbender salamanders crowded around his boat, staring and hissing, so that his departure was slowed for having to shoo them out of the way. The newts and the dart frogs sat around smirking and laughing, and he could hear them for several hundred feet. Amphibians were ambiguous, Sephiri thought, shaking his head. Traitorous. Whose side were they on, anyway? His Water friends? The Air people? He had never been able to figure it out.
    But he had to be brave this time in the living room. He had to remember that this was the carpet, even in the night. It was his mother’s carpet, where he shouldn’t have an “accident.” To get to the cube-shaped black, he would have to overcome his fear and