Let's Go Play at the Adams'

by Mendal W. Johnson

And he felt things that were not entirely warranted—more grief than a dead bird demanded, more beauty and grandeur than a winter night’s sky possessed. His sensitivity, in short, went beyond the useful to the useless and to the harmful itself.

In grown-ups’ comforting company, there was noise and purposefulness and direction all the time. Meals must be gotten, potatoes dug, trips to

People in pain live by a different clock, she thought; it never moves.