-1- The Silver Bird

   Dallas leaned far out of the window, his eyes fixed on a bird flying lazily in the distance.  Sun slanted through the clouds above, as if a spotlight were aimed on the bird.
   A silver bird, Dallas thought. A magical silver bird.
   The bird turned suddenly, veering south over the small town of Boxton, toward the faded yellow building and the window from which Dallas leaned.  Dallas stretched his arm out.  “Here!” he called.  “Over here!”
   The bird swooped toward him and then rose up over the building, high, high into the air, over the alley and the train tracks and the dried-up creek.  Dallas watched it rise on the air currents over one brown hiss and then another, until it disappeared.
   He tried to follow it in his mind.  He imagined it flying on until it spied a narrow green valley, a scooped-out basin with a creek looping and winding its way through the center.  He pictured it swooping down from the sky into this basin in the hills, to this place where cool breezes drifted through the trees, and where the creek was so clear that every stone on its bottom was visible.
    Maybe the silver bird had flown home.
    “Get out of that window!” a voice shouted from below. “No leaning out of windows!”
 Dallas leaned a little farther out and called down to Mr. Trepid. “Did you see that silver bird?”
    “Get out of that window, or you’re going to join your sister down here pulling the weeds”, Mr. Trepid threatened.
    Dallas spotted his sister, Florida, inching her way along the sidewalk, wrenching clumps of weeds and grass and dirt from the ground.
   “Putrid weeds,” Florida snarled, heaving a clod of dirt over her shoulder.
    Dallas watched as the clod landed on Mr. Trepid’s back and as the man scuttled over to Florida and whacked her on the head.  Dallas wished the silver bird would return and snare Mr. Trepid and carry him high up over the town and then drop him, splat, in the middle.

-2- The Boxton Creek Home

   Boxton was a tired town, a neglected place that looked as if it was in danger of collapsing in on itself.  A tangle of old homes and shacks clustered around small stores and building s that had seen better days.  One of these buildings was the Boxton Creek Home for Children, a ramshackle house that tilted toward the train tracks and hills beyond.  In this building lived the bungling managers, Mr. and Mrs. Trepid; their assistant, Morgan; and thirteen children, ranging in age from six months to thirteen years.
   The two oldest children in the Boxton Creek Home were twins, Dallas and Florida.  They were tall for their age, dark-haired and dark-eyed, with sturdy frames and a rough-edged and unkempt look about them.  Dallas was the quieter of the two and the one more inclined to daydreaming, while Florida was loud and squirmy, with her mouth full of words bursting out, and her face full of expression, flashing from surprise to disgust in an instant.
   The managers of the Home, Mr. and Mrs. Trepid, were middle-aged, cranky and tired, and growing stiff and cold as winter-bound trees.  They believed in rules, and their rules were posted on doorways and in hallways and above each child’s bed.  There were general rules and kitchen rules, basement rules and outside rules, clothing rules, washing rules, cleaning rules, rules upon rules.
   “If we didn’t have rules,” Mr. Trepid liked to say, “everything would be chaos.”
   “If we didn’t have rules,” his wife would say, “these children would eat us alive.”
   Since Dallas and Florida had lived in the Boxton Creek Home longer than any of the other children there, they knew all the rules.  They also knew the punishments for disobeying the rules, and they knew them well, because they had broken every rule in the Boxton Creek Home.  Many times.
   “How can we live every day of our lives without running or shouting or throwing or talking or dropping or spilling?” Dallas had once asked Mr. Trepid.
   “Thinking corner.  Two hours,” was Mr. Trepid’s reply.
   As he sat in the dark corner of the basement, Dallas imagined a broad field rimmed with trees, and in that imaginary field he ran and shouted and threw sticks and mud, and when he was tired, he lay down in the green grass and felt himself getting smaller and smaller until he was a little baby lying in the grass, and someone with a sweet face leaned down and wrapped him in a white blanket.
   When Florida was caught breaking one of the rules, she was more likely to argue and, as a result, to earn extra punishments.  She could not sit still, could not walk when her feet wanted to run, and so on a fairly regular basis, she’d be running down the hall and Mrs. Trepid’s long skinny arm would dart out from a doorway, snare Florida, and lead her to the nearest copy of The Rules.
   “What does that say?” Mrs. Trepid demanded.
   Florida squinted at the sign. “No stupid running.”
   “It does not say that,” Mrs. Trepid said, urging Florida’s face closer to the sign.  “Read it again.”
   “No stinking stupid running.”
   “Down to the basement.  Two hours in the Thinking Corner.”
   “That’s stupid.”
   “Followed by two hours of floor scrubbing.”
   “Putrid.”
   “Followed by two hours of weed pulling.”

Dallas and Florida had racked up hundreds of hours in the Thinking Corner, the damp, dark, cobwebbed corner of the basement.  They had a worn the scratchy I’ve Been Bad shirts, shoveled manure, crawled across acres of fields pulling weeds.  They had also peeled potatoes, scrubbed pots and floors, washed windows, and hauled boxes and broken furniture.
    “Good hard thinking and good hard work never hurt anybody,” Mr. Trepid would say.  Mr. Trepid, who was a short, squat man with an awkward walk like a crab scuttling across the ocean floor, did not particularly like thinking or working himself, but he firmly believed that these were good things for children.
    The Home was a misfit operation, lost over the years in a larger system.  Funds dribbled in, but social workers no longer came to check on the children; health workers and building inspectors no longer came to inspect the building.  There was no longer a doctor on staff, or secretarial help.  It was run solely by the Trepids, with the help of their overworked assistant, Morgan, who referred to herself as Chief Gopher.
   Still, the Boxton Creek Home was as much a home as Dallas and Florida knew.  On the front of the building, faded yellow paint curled in strips, like peeling skin.  Behind the main building, a string of smaller cubes had been added in a crooked path out the back.  Dallas thought it looked like a string of mismatched boxcars laid end to end, and Florida thought it looked like a dragon, with its huge mouth at the front door, waiting to swallow up children who entered it.
When children first came to the Boxton Creek Home, they stayed in one of the bigger rooms in front.  But gradually, as the months and years went by, if they’d not been placed elsewhere, they were shunted farther and farther back, to the dark, low-ceilinged, airless rooms at the tail of the house.
   “Rotation,” Mr. Trepid called it.  “Rotation!”