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Silly Putty It came in a plastic egg that fit in your palm, split lengthwise. Inside, it lay protoplasmic, fetal pink. It didn't harden or puU apart Uke clay. When you bit into it, your eyetooth sank and then popped through, as through a rubber lip. We puUed it like taffy, roUed it into worms or into baUs we bounced off the floor or desktop. We pressed it down onto newspaper and then peeled it away, drawing up the faces of Nancy and Sluggo, Snoopy, Archie and Veronica, a bold headline letter, a scrap of news. Then we'd stretch it, distorting the faces, elongating the story into parody. FinaUy we'd fold it into a mouth that chewed and swaUowed letters and colors, working them back into the pink, graying it to beige. Putty took it aU in, even the funnies we didn't understand, the news we wouldn't hear for years. Fractured Skull Ifthere were a film it would show Mary's head ricocheting back offthe tree and hitting mine, the back ridge of her skuU slamming into my broad, flat forehead. The big kids got blamed for letting us go down on the toboggan without one of them. How new we were, to have hung on as the tree rushed toward us, to have been too frightened, too rapt in speed simply to fall off, roU away into the snow. I had a big lump, navy blue and green. Mary had a fractured skuU. She hadn't yet shed her cloudy baby tongue, so she said it was fwack-shode. She disappeared from kindergarten for long weeks, and we felt her absence like a smaU ghost. When she came back, wearing a soft pink-and-white wool hat, it was as if she were an angel returned from some edge we hadn't known about, where her head, now fuzzy bald Uke a new chick's, had cracked and some of her pale Usping life had seeped out. 53 54Fourth Genre Rabbit Egg The book was large and thin, shiny dark green, and it had no words. A baby rabbit, small and brown, curled inside an egg, fast asleep. Outside, in the world, a duck studied the egg lovingly. The duck pecked and kicked at it, jumped on it, roUed it down a hiU, but the sheU held and the rabbit slept, curled into itself, bigger and bigger for every page. FinaUy the rabbit was fullgrown , stiU cramped inside the now-huge egg, quiet, four feet pressing against the inside of the shell like a giant pushing against the pearly sheU of a sky, having outgrown a perfect, fragile world. The egg cracked, finaUy, and rabbit woke to duck, to this weird love waiting as ifit were meant to be. L· ...

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