Rob Moses became aware of something lightly touching the tip of his nose. Perhaps it was a fly or perhaps a mosquito but it brought him out of deep sleep to the next level of consciousness - somewhere between dream and reality.  The amount of light coming in through the southern windows of his bedroom told him that he had probably slept longer than he wanted to.  He kept his eyes shut hoping to make the transition from asleep to awake as slow as possible. There were only two weeks left to his summer. In just 14 days, the scraggly salt and pepper beard would disappear. His tightly curled hair would be closely cropped and he would reenter the button down shirt and khaki world of a high school biology teacher.

Something touched his nose again. He shooed it away without opening his eyes. He thought of all that he had wanted to do with Danny but another summer had somehow slipped away like a greased sunbather diving into a pool. There it was again - this time accompanied by a giggle that could no longer be contained. Rob reached over the side of the bed and grabbed a handful of pajamas that contained the wiggling and squealing body of his seven year-old son Danny. Rob pulled him onto the bed and exposed Danny's belly. Pressing his lips to the bare soft skin, he made the wettest and juiciest fart noise that one breath of air could produce--a noise that was guaranteed to send any seven year- old into convulsive fits of laughter. It never failed.

              Danny was still holding the pencil and string with one of the plastic flies from his bug box tied to it. Rob nodded toward it, "Nice wake up call."

                Danny smiled, "Yea, got ya good didn't I? But not as good as I'm gonna get you now!"

              Danny stood up and bounced several times before diving on his father's chest, "I give... I give..." Rob said with agony in his voice. Danny slapped the bed three times imitating the trumped up pro wrestling matches that he watched on TV when his mother wasn't looking. Rob hugged him and kissed him on the forehead, " Love ya, Bud."

               Danny dropped his feigned machismo and nuzzled up to him, "Love you too, Dad."

              Rob glanced at his simulated wood alarm clock which announced the time, 9:07 in red numbers. He smacked Danny on the butt and said, "Time's a wastin'... I should've been up hours ago."

              "That's what you get for staying up and watching Letterman," Danny said mimicking his mother's words.

"Just what I need is another voice of reason in this house," Rob said as he pulled on a pair of faded denim shorts that had spent the night on the bedpost. "Did you have breakfast?"

                "Yup, bowl of  Cocoa Crispers and a glass of milk."

The fresh gourmet coffee that Trina had made at 6:00 this morning would have taken on the consistency of used motor oil by now. A little extra milk and sugar would help make it palatable. Rob checked the pot. It was bone dry as if the coffee had never been made. But... now that he thought about it... he had no sense of her getting up today. Usually he was vaguely aware of the alarm going off or the shower running or the coffee brewing. Today there was nothing. The first memory he had was of Danny dancing that fake fly on and off of his nose.

     Danny emerged from his bedroom having shed the racing car pajamas that were losing the race with his long spindly legs. Rob was finishing the last bite of a toaster bagel, "Ready for action, Captain." He recited the call to action that Captain Invincible's loyal sidekick and talking dog Woofer would use when the forces of intergalactic evil threatened our way of life.

     Danny deepened his voice to simulate the Captain's, "Let's do it, Woof," came the standard reply. Captain Invincible was Danny's favorite show. He got up faithfully every morning at 8 o'clock to absorb each new adventure.

              As they stepped outside, the chill of the previous night was still in the air. In New Hampshire, the nights tell more about the approaching autumn than the calendar does. Rob noticed that some of the swamp maples down by the lake were already beginning to turn. Although fall was a beautiful season in New England, Rob always felt a sense of melancholy when it arrived. Maybe it was because his ability to spend a full day with Danny was drawing to a close. At the beginning of each summer, Rob made a list of the things he hoped to accomplish. The list never came close to completion but it was a good thought. Today the garden was on his agenda - deadheading the perennials and digging up the tender bulbs that wouldn't make it through the New Hampshire winter.

     Danny dropped his little set of garden tools when he saw them, "Cool," was all he could say. The area in back of their house was about the size of two football fields placed side by side. It was speckled with black-eyed Susans and a dry, hot summer had turned it the color of perfectly done toast. Flying around were hundreds, maybe thousands, of dragonflies. They would arrive for a day or two every year then depart just as mysteriously. They seemed to be flitting about randomly, however, Rob's knowledge of biology told him that there was nothing random in nature. He suspected that this was the dragonfly version of a singles bar although his forays into that world had never yielded a pattern, either. But the end result was the same - the ultimate dance. The dragonflies that were flying in tandem seemed to have discovered that their steps were syncopated or their Zodiac signs were compatible. Danny asked why the bugs were flying together and Rob told him that they were making friends. The real reason was a discussion they would have all too soon - but not today.

                         Danny ran into the field, not to chase the dragonflies but to immerse himself in their dance. He seemed to be in harmony with them and they accepted him as if he was just a tall and slender blade of grass with blond hair. They somehow sensed that he had been born without predatory instincts and as yet the world had taught him none. They flew around him like tiny helicopters - hovering then darting away. He held his arms out from his sides and they began to land on him - first one then two until he was covered with them. He looked like a cross in the middle of the field covered with dragonflies. Danny walked slowly back to where Rob was standing and one by one the dragonflies took off until only one remained on his finger. He passed it to Rob and it sat on his father's finger for a moment - finally taking off and rejoining the dance.

              They ate Danny's favorite lunch out on the picnic table - grilled cheese and apples slathered with peanut butter. Rob pointed to a large deposit of peanut butter in the corner of Danny's mouth. He brought the sleeve of his tee shirt up and wiped it away. Rob brought his cell phone out with him anticipating the daily lunchtime call from Trina who was, "Just checking up on my boys." She would call after finishing her container of  yogurt and the one cigarette a day that was left over from her pack-a-day habit. Her offering to the gods of abuse she would say when he questioned her about it. Rob also suspected that she was slightly envious of their summers together and the daily phone call was her way of sharing that time with them. The phone never rang.

Long dark shadowy fingers of night were beginning to overtake the backyard. Rob looked out of the back window as he rinsed off the last of the supper dishes. It was getting dark earlier now. By 7 o'clock, the darkness would have won its daily battle with the light. The sound of water draining from upstairs signaled the end of Danny's bath. Trina's chicken breast was rapidly turning to leather in the oven. A call to her office yielded only a recording with her firm's normal business hours which Rob already knew were long past. Her extension produced only voice mail. Danny came down the creaky stairs wearing a fresh pair of pajamas and a flushed complexion from the warm bath water.

     "Where's mom?" Danny asked. "I miss her."

     "Don't know, Bud. I called her at work but she didn't answer."

     "Are you and mom getting divorced?"

    Rob was stunned, "Now why would you think that, Danny?"

     "I don't know. On TV, when somebody doesn't come home the people usually get divorced."

"You've been watching too much TV, buddy -boy! She probably stopped off after work somewhere."

     "Why wouldn't she call?"  Rob tried to hide his obvious concern but he didn't have an answer.

     They completed their nightly ritual - a bowl of chocolate-chip mint ice cream, a game of old maid and a story of Danny's choice after he had crawled under the covers of his old maple bed. Tonight Danny chose The Little Prince. As Rob approached the ending, Danny mouthed the words as his father read them. His eyes were getting heavy. Rob kissed him on the forehead and said, "Goodnight, Little Prince."

     "Goodnight, Big King," was Danny's standard reply.

     Rob sat on the floor and leaned against the side of his bed. The last thing he remembered was Danny wrapping one of the curls in Rob's hair around his finger and saying, "It'll be okay, Dad. Mom's trying to help."

     He was staring at the dinosaur poster that Danny had put on the wall in front of him - over the TV. He thought about how peaceful they looked waiting for that big asteroid to hit the earth and destroy them.

Ring.....

      The piercing electronic tone roused Rob from a sleep that he couldn't remember succumbing to. He opened his eyes. The first strains of a new day were coming in the window breaking the darkness. Then it all came back to like a sucker punch. The last phone call that had startled him from a dead sleep was a Sergeant Somebody from the New Hampshire State Police informing him that his son Daniel had been taken to the hospital with a gun shot wound to the chest and that his condition was very serious. Then there was the two-hour drive to Durham that they made in an hour and a half - too nervous to exchange more than a few words. As they stormed into the reception area, the look on the emergency room doctor's face said it all - they were too late. Trina had let a wail the sound of which would remain locked in Rob's aural memory for the rest of his life. Tears streamed down his cheeks as he fought the urge to throw up.

Ring......

The bullet that killed Danny must have been of the same magic caliber that killed JFK. After it ripped through Danny's chest nicking the artery that fed his heart it continued on for another hundred miles piercing the hearts of his mother and father. It took away a kid that had struggled to get good grades and was finally accepted at the University of New Hampshire. It took away a kid that fought to make the football team even after being cut on the first try. It took away a kid that cut the grass of an elderly neighbor, accepting lemonade as payment, because he knew that she barely had enough money to make ends meet .He would never marry or have children. He had been frozen in time by a 1 oz. piece of metal.

Ring.....

There was plenty of blame to go around but Rob had trouble pinning it squarely in any one spot. Danny's roommates were first in line. They had taken him to a bar to celebrate him his 21st birthday - a rite of passage that most people survive. The drug dealer that fired the shot was the obvious candidate. He said at the trial that he hadn't meant to hurt anyone. He had taken the gun out to scare a guy that owed him money. It went off by mistake - the bullet skipped off of the asphalt and into Danny. He was really just a kid himself - not much older than Danny. A kid that had come to believe a gun could balance the unbalanced equation that life had written for him. The state provided him with 15 years to contemplate that choice. It was a verdict that Rob thought would somehow help to fill the dark hollow space where his heart used to be. It didn't.Or should they blame themselves? They had tried to give Danny an equal measure of love and discipline and sent him off to college fully anticipating that he would return after 4 years at least semi-ready to face the world. But Danny had not come home. The chrysalis that had been mutilated by the Emergency Room doctors trying to save his life - then shipped home in an ugly box - was not Danny.

Ring....

The room was exactly as he had left it. An ice blue Porsche tooling down some mythical country road had replaced the dinosaur poster. It was the car Danny said he would buy when he got his first really good job. It was a car he would never drive. The phone seemed to be screaming for him to pick it up and, as he reached for it, he noticed a small plastic super-hero figure sitting next to him on the floor. Rob was sure that he had put them up in the attic with all of his other toys when his attention had turned to sports, then to cars and finally to girls. Yet, there it sat--Captain Invincible. He had Danny's favorite because nothing could hurt him. The only thing that could be broken was his heart. Rob wondered how many times Danny had played with it - even slept wih it. How much of Danny's energy did it still contain and how in the hell did it get out of the attic? He picked up the phone.

    "Hello," he said in a groggy-sounding voice.

    "Rob..." it was Trina's voice inflected with frenzy, "thank God. I've been trying to call you. Where have you been?"

    He paused knowing how ridiculous his answer was going to sound, "I spent the day with Danny."

    There was a period of silence on the other end, "You mean you went to his grave or... what?"

    "No, I mean he woke me up yesterday morning and he was seven years old again and we spent the day together just like we did every summer."

    "Rob, are you okay?"

    "Actually, Trina, I am okay...or at least better. For the first time since it happened, I feel like the heavy black shroud that was draped over me has been lifted off."

"That's wonderful, Rob. I was so afraid..." her voice tailed off.

"Why didn't you come home?"

"I decided to spend a couple of nights with my sister. We went out to dinner... out to movie - no big deal. I just needed to get away - not from you, Rob - from the sorrow. I can't cry anymore and I can't mourn anymore. We have to rejoice in the 21 wonderful years that we had him but now we have to let him go."

"You probably think I'm crazy, Trina but he was here. He really was here. He missed you. The odd thing is that it was just an ordinary day just like so many of the others we spent together. If only I had known, we could have done something special. Gone to a ball game something..."

     "I don't know what happened yesterday, Rob. Maybe the other side is closer than we think. But I think something special did happen - something magic - and maybe there is no such thing as an ordinary day. Maybe Danny was trying to tell you that every day is different than any other. Like snowflakes."

"Do you think he knew how much I loved him? I stopped telling him when he got older."

"You might have stopped telling him in words but believe me Rob... he knew. Maybe he chose to come back at an age when the two of you were closest - before the world started to get between you."

"Trina, I've decided to go back to school this term. I don't think they'll hold my job much longer."

"That's wonderful, Rob that's the best thing I've heard in a long time. It's the best thing you can do. I'll see tonight. Love ya."

"I love you, too," he said to the silence after she had hung up.

Rob went into the bathroom and shaved off the growth that was just a few days short of a full beard. He fixed two plates with grilled cheese and apples slathered with peanut butter. He took them out to the picnic table where he and Danny had eaten so many lunches together. He put Captain Invincible on the edge of the table next to a plate - where Danny used to sit.

There was a blue sky softened by high wispy clouds that Danny would have seen as dragons or elephants and Rob would have said that he saw them, too. A dragonfly started circling and eventually landed on the grilled cheese sandwich then moved to the Captain's outstretched arm. It stayed there for a long while - just barely moving its gossamer wings. Rob didn't move a muscle - hoping not to scare it away. Finally a warm, gentle breeze came along - the dragonfly caught it and flew out of sight. Rob wished that he could change into a dragonfly and join it but he knew that was not going to happen - at least not today.

Copyright 2004 by Walter Schnabel