You Break It, You Own It

The boy stands barechested in the creek mud, his white stomach clenched with cold. His skin is drum taut and tiger-striped in red welts, the switch's kiss. He buries his feet in the black mud. His daddy says this part of the woods is Indian-cursed. The oak leaves and acorns are black, and the squirrels evolved black to better blend into the trees' tarry bark. He looks up as a black grackle caws.

His cousin is kneeling in the shadows under an old oak tree. She's built a pyramid of onyx acorns, and she whispers quietly to herself while experimenting with balance, feeling the invisible power catch when she aligns the gravity just so with her small fingers. The boy dives down to the silty bottom and rolls over to watch the shadow play of the breeze and leaf and light filtering down from the canopy through the water. He rolls again and presses his face and stomach into the cold, creek-bed muck, then kicks and shoots toward his cousin, a blind bullet. He surfaces, water and bits of black-leaf muck sheathing off his goose-bumped marble skin. Blue-veined marble with welted-red stripes. "I am a crocodile," he says, eyes flat blue glass, as still as any stalking things. He shoots out an arm, swipes the pyramid down. Her carefully weighed invisible bonds vanish.

She starts to cry but a branch cracks, and his daddy steps into the clearing. She bites her tongue and makes a smile shape. The boy drops back into the water and freezes like a tiny soldier who has just heard the rifle stock of a sniper. The black water ripples just beneath his eyes, blond hair swirling in the current.

"Time to get," Daddy says.

In the bed of his pickup truck the wind whips both kids' hair, and they watch Tennessee flying away behind them. "Where are we going?" she asks, but the wind eats her words. The boy turns to her anyway, eyes blue-glass marbles: part lizard and part fairy prince. Part glass-eyed pirate and part crocodile. Won't say "Don't know."

The truck parks, and the kids clamber over the tailgate, following the boy's daddy to a shop window full of crystal. The man's shadow is tall as a giant on the pavement, the kids' shadows trailing behind him. The slanted orange light passes through the shop window, gets caught in thousands of facets and shoots back blinding. The setting sun, blazing and shattered.

Inside it is cool, and little herds of miniature animals are frozen on the countertops, the ghosts of things that sniffed lion scent and turned to ice. The girl steps carefully, hands clasped behind her back.

"Look with your eyes, not your hands," the lady says. The cups and plates look sharp enough to cut you if you drink or eat from them. There is a crystal deer like the one his daddy killed, but clean and clearer than ice. No organs, no blood. Shining. The lady points to a sign, pronounces the words slowly: You Break It, You Own It.

From the ceiling hangs the largest object in the shop, a star of many blade-like points, spinning slowly in the draft of musty air-conditioning. The boy cranes his head back to stare, dust motes glowing holy in the salmon light. He can imagine the points under his fingers: would they cut you or melt away? Does a star have a tiny mouth like a starfish? Like the one we had as a Christmas decoration until it started to rot? Granddaddy Biggs told them how starfish have tiny mouths and suck their food inside in teeny-tiny bites. He decides this star must be made of diamonds, so it is probably the most valuable thing in the world. He can never have it. He can never have anything like it.

But what if the sign is a message for him, a secret code? He sees this is a thing he can have, because You Break It, You Own It. It would...