“Which weighs more--a pound of rocks, or a pound of feathers?”
“Hmm, let me see. A pound of rocks?”
“No, Mommy; they weigh the same. Get it?”
And then laughs. That sweet laugh that is like the sun. He giggles, and she giggles with him, and his father joins in. It’s a good one, a funny one, and it is his favorite little joke, a little boy’s riddle.
Now his mother stands in an open doorway, staring into a bedroom, at a bed where once a boy had lain. Her gaze wanders around the empty room, taking in the bureau where the boy’s clothes are neatly folded and stacked inside drawers, and atop which are scattered a few knickknacks and figurines.
“Can we see the monkeys?” the boy asks.
“There a lot of animals besides monkeys at the zoo, honey,” his mother says.
“Yeah, but can we see the monkeys?”
“Yes, we can see the monkeys.”
She rests her gaze on the plastic chest pushed up against the wall beneath the window, where the bulk of her son’s toys are stored. She looks back to the bed, neatly made, so empty and sad, like a forgotten animal. It is a bed where once a boy had lain, but will lie no more.
“Tell me a story you’ve never told before,” the boys says.
His father is still at work, and when he gets home he will look in on the boy, give him a peck on the head, and leave him to his dreams, but right now it’s just the boy and his mother.
“What kind of a story should I tell?” the mother asks, stroking her son’s chestnut hair.
“Tell me a story from before time.”
And she thinks really hard, trying to think how to begin, and then she finds the words and tells him a story from before time.
She closes the door to his bedroom and floats down the hall, passing the closed door of the bathroom where the boy took his baths, and brushed his teeth, and where she once sat him on the closed lid of the toilet so she could clean and bandage a scraped knew that he had gotten when he tripped and fell in the driveway while running to stop a ball from rolling into the street.
“How many stars are there?” he asks.
“I don’t know,” his father says.
His father is not at work on this day, and the boy is happy. He is happy to have both of his parents to himself. He is a sapling basking in the sunshine of their tenderness.
“I bet there are more than a million,” the boy says.
“Maybe there are.”
The woman enters the room she shares with her husband, but he is gone, he is still at work and won’t be home for an hour yet. Leaving the light off, she moves tot eh bed and lies down on top of the covers. She lies in darkness staring into the shadows, into a pitiless void that seems to throb with menace, threatening to swallow her whole, to envelop her, to make her disappear. It takes her a moment to realize that the void is not without, but within. It lives at the core of her, a cold stone in her stomach.
“What weighs more, mommy? A pound of rocks, or a pound of feathers?”
“They weigh the same,” she whispers to the empty room. “They weigh the same.”
This time there is no smile, and there is no laughter. There is no boy. There’s just the room, the darkness, and the night.