Peter loved to hear the story of how his father tried to steal the sun.

“It’s the reason the poppies exist,” his mother said. “Your dad had climbed into the sky and touched the light, actually had his hands gripped around the sun.”

“What did it feel like?” Peter asked.

“Have you ever touched a really hot light bulb?” his mom said. “But the sun burned his hands. He pulled away and scattered sunlight over the field, causing all these bright poppies to grow. The sun, angry for having been caught, fell that night.”

“It falls every night.”

“But that was the first time. It fell and sulked and didn’t come back. Your dad gave us these beautiful fields of flowers. But he also brought the darkness.”

Peter held tight to his bear in the back seat. The promise of darkness didn’t scare him, but the wind always made him nervous. He inhaled the scent of the bear’s fur, like wood and soil. The poppies shone orange along the horizon, where flower petals covered the earth like unmelted snowfall. The world pulsed and breathed as it passed through the window into the back seat of the car—the bliz- zard of orange in the distance cascaded in the breeze. The closer the car came to the poppies, the lower the sun fell. Peter’s mom always called it a game, like chicken—they had to make it to the field before the sun set.

The field had become their escape. “Our escape—Sam and Peter’s.” Peter asked who Sam was. His mom said she was Sam. He didn’t stop calling her mom. “This is a place we can run,” and they ran there often. Peter would watch his mom paint,

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more often try to paint, but Peter wanted to run, to shoot through the poppies and feel the brush of the petals on his skin as the wind trailed behind him.

“It wasn’t literal,” his mom once told him. Peter looked at her, unsure of what she meant. “Forget it,” she told him before he asked. She popped a few pills. “Whatever makes you feel better.” The pills were sky blue in colour. Peter thought of the possibilities of bottling and swallowing the sky; what kind of clouds would drift through his stomach? Would they taste like marshmallows? Then he remem- bered lightning storms, and the pills made him nervous. His mom could take all the sky pills she wanted, but he wouldn’t touch them.

The car jerked to a halt.

“Sorry, darling,” his mother said. “We’re here.”

Peter opened the door. He pushed himself from the seat. He couldn’t move. He tugged. He struggled. He stretched. The seatbelt was wrapped around his chest; he unbuckled it.

“Not so fast,” his mother said. “Don’t forget him.” She pointed to the teddy bear in the back seat.

Peter grabbed Claus by the arm and fled the car. He didn’t bother to close the door. The tent was in the back seat. His dad had taught his mom how to pitch a tent, but his mom hadn’t taught Peter. She was too eager to get the tent set up and paint.

She yelled to Peter; the wind took the words away. But he knew them by heart: Don’t go too far. He never did. He ran in circles and belly-flopped into the flowers surrounded by orange dots. The soft soil squished under his feet, and the breeze blew at his back while Claus held his hand and urged him forward.

“Look how fast I can run,” he called to his mom, but she was setting up the tent and never looked over. Peter breathed in the air, and the field drew into his nose. He huffed, and the soft flowers brushed against the back of his hands, and his heartbeat quickened when the wind blew past him, but he continued forward

Life Between Seconds 7

at the same speed, confident the wind would soon fall behind, and it did fall be- hind, which made Peter push faster and farther towards the hills where the sun would soon hide. He dug his feet into the earth and jumped into the horizon, to push himself, beat the wind, listen to Claus’s advice, touch the sun, and look down from the sky rather than swallow it.

Peter stopped to breathe, and the wind whipped his face. It had caught up to him; it was temperamental—with a faraway source, a sore loser who tended to get physical—always filled with or followed by the faint scent of decayed flesh and rusted metal.

His mom had told him a story about the wind once, with a wolf that breathed in the entire world to blow down anything that stood in his way. It had started with “Once upon a time,” and now those words felt pushed as far away as the rest of the story, taken by the wind, like his mom’s words, to a place farther than where Peter dared to run.

Peter slid to the ground out of the way of the wind. The smell of fresh dirt filled his nose, and as he pressed his back to the earth, the flowers surrounded his head and covered the partial light of the sky. The poppies cushioned Peter’s head. The sky held a blend of sun and stars. Clouds drifted between the light and dark. Peter had no desire to name the cloud animals or count the rings on the clouds to see how old they were.

Peter wrapped his fingers around a poppy. The petals were moist and tender between his fingertips. He half hoped the orange would stain his skin and paint him, hide him in the field, and when his mom called for him, he’d sway in the breeze and blend into the scene he knew she had frozen onto her canvas. But the petals only released water, and Peter left them crumbled in the dirt.

The sky turned dark, and the poppy stems thrashed against his body in the heavy wind. He stood and ran towards the light of the tent.

“Don’t even think about diving in here,” his mom said as Peter readied for his pounce. “You know the rules.” Peter bent down to take off his shoes. The wind

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pushed at him again. “And don’t just slip them off either,” she said. “That’s how you ruin them.”

Peter ducked into the tent. It was large enough for both him and his mom to stand in. It was where she preferred to paint, out of the wind with the flap open to the view. Peter made his way to the cooler and grabbed some grapes. He didn’t offer any to Claus. Claus hated red grapes.

His mother had two canvases next to the tent's opening, one on each side. They looked like windows. One was old; it was the first painting Peter had watched her create. She had said she needed release, placed Peter in a high chair, and pressed her brush to canvas. She said this so often when Peter was young; he thought painting was called “release.” He would run around the house with paint on his hands, past the kitchen into his parents’ room where he would press his wet fingers to empty walls and yell, “Release! Release!” His tiny hands imprinted on the world, his tiny mark made permanent, like his mother’s art. Paint was forever, like fun and Claus and his parents, he had thought. Then, in the absence of his father, Peter remembered where the scent of charred flesh and metal came from. Painting wasn’t a release, but release, for him, became a prayer.

Peter tossed grapes into his mouth, one by one, and positioned them between his teeth. He wanted to savor the crunch. The squish. The juice. The sweetness. His mouth filled with saliva. He chomped down, chewed the skin. He wiped his mouth with his arm. The tent rustled in the wind but held firm to the ground.

The older painting was of giant hills bordered by Victorian homes and a trolley car. He scanned the painting house-by-house, street-by-street, car-by-car. His mother liked to hide images in her art. She always said the search was half the fun.

“You know where it is,” she said. “You’ve seen it a hundred times.”

He scanned the colorful, hilly streets and found the image, his mother’s face, painted as the back of the streetcar. Her honey hair ran over the top of the trolley as ribbon, with big clear window eyes and a large advertised smile, not the same smile Peter was used to; it was a smile he had never seen before. More teeth— shiny white—bright, clear eyes.

Life Between Seconds 9

“That’s the only self-portrait I ever painted,” she said. Peter bit into another grape. “You ready to see the new one?” she asked. She took the last grape from Peter’s hand. He nodded and brought Claus with him. It wasn’t a race, but Peter wanted to find the image before Claus. That was their game. The painting didn’t have hills; it had mountains—rocky peaks sprouted above the clouds. Birds flew around the base as if they could fly no higher, thwarted by a mountaintop. The clouds, fluffy and mystical, as if they would disappear with one shallow breath, but unable to hide an object any more than Claus could hide his eye patch. The birds’ wings flapped and interrupted the silent air that surrounded them. The tiny sky above the mountaintop sat empty.

In the rocks, the small pieces that built the towering summit, he found the secret, on a rock face in the middle—his father, chiseled into the granite, almost invisible. His face full of the wide smile Peter almost couldn’t remember, his beard made of granite, his eyes made of soft gray stone that seemed familiar. After his father’s death, his mother hid more of him in her paintings—him or the car, some- times crushed, immortalized in her art.

“You find him?” she asked with a hint of hesitation in her voice. Peter brought his shoulders to his ears and nodded. “Of course you did,” she said with a smile, the smile he was used to. She grabbed him and held him between her arms as they faced the paintings split by the tent flap open to the night.

“Do you know where that is?” she asked. Peter shook his head. But he knew. She had told him before, in pictures she had shown in galleries, or thrown in dumpsters, or painted over, or that fell out of her purse in postcards, or that she drew on the walls at home in her sleep, which Peter blamed on Claus. He held Claus closer to him, a sign for Claus not to answer the question.

“That’s Peru. Machu Picchu. Your dad loved it there. It was his favorite. I never got to go. Me and your father....” The look Peter had grown used to, where his mother sunk into a far-off stare almost stunned by existence, returned to her face for a brief moment. She returned faster than Peter expected, rubbed her hand through his hair, and said, “You know I’d never leave you, right?”

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Peter blinked. He had never thought his mom might leave before. Would she take the sky with her, bottled up in those pills and wiping the world black?

“I promise,” she said.

His mom’s stomach pushed against his back with every breath.

“Where’s that one?” his mom asked. Peter shook his head again. “That’s San Francisco. That is my favorite.” She was warm around him as if the coldness of her comment had never existed. “What about there?” she pointed to the open tent; a faint orange of the poppies visible in the moonlight; the wind had disappeared with the final trace of the sun. “That’s here,” Peter giggled.

“Of course it is,” his mom said. She ran her fingers down Peter’s ribcage. He pressed himself into her, delighted by the attention. Even Claus almost smiled.

“Let’s go play,” his mom said. Peter giggled again. “But it’s night,” he said.

“Is it? Then let’s go bounce on the moon!”

The sweetness of Peter’s mom’s skin replaced the dirt scent of the field, and Peter wanted to melt into her, become the paint she brushed onto her canvas. They pushed open the tent where the night stretched over the quiet poppies and gentle air. Sam held onto Peter, Peter held onto Claus, and together they jumped out of the tent into a dusty hollow that let Peter and Claus dance with his mom one last time.