Catalpa Ln.

Within the past week, Jack found he couldn’t stand the thought of walking through the thick fog that stood as a wall at the end of the street, couldn’t believe that there was any longer a side opposite to what he could see. He grew apprehensive when he thought about it, and that apprehension turned to fear. He might be lost within it. Five, maybe ten, feet in the fog became impenetrable, a wall of flat white, and each time previous when he’d ventured into that white, often herding his brother and sister in front of him, to school or to buy groceries, his mind remarked (calmly, even though his heart would race as the words began to form): So this is what it’s like to be struck blind.

The fog began farther uptown about six blocks past the higher end of Sonora Grade and created a giant ring either encompassing or cutting through three separate neighborhoods. Newspapers began to report on the phenomena and scientists were asked to hypostulate on its structure. It began as a haze building in ground fog and with tendrils of mist lacing a three-story wall in a tight knit. The wall of fog stood at an estimate of thirty feet high and twenty feet thick, and only as it became a thing of depth instead of water particulates floating through the air, did the ring begin to shrink toward its center and gradually—over a duration of a year and a half—encroach upon Jack’s street: Catalpa Ln.

And now he worried that there may no longer be a world outside of that thick mass, the fog retroactively (his mind could easily convince itself of a sentient knowledge and a willful act of bio-chemical sabotage that allowed the chemical bonds in all things—buildings, plants, animals, and even human beings—to break down long after the fog had passed, as if on a timer) erasing everything that should’ve been and replacing it with itself so that he might be doomed to wander a sightless landscape until the end of his days.

Jack Corbeau Page, Jr. (age 15)—known as ‘Corbeau’ only to his family and to his parents’ friends—lived at what he believed to be the very center of the fog’s circumference, what would be the last bastion if the fog continued to shrink. He woke up again that morning to his mother’s violent coughing, followed by a few sympathetic coughs of his father’s own. They had been sick for three months and twelve days by then, falling ill one after the other like dominoes over a period of several days, and were too weak to work or do household chores or to even totter the short distance from the bed to the bathroom. Jack had taken to caring for them, as well as his younger siblings, feeding them, helping them to the bathroom, and changing their bed sheets after depositing them in twin rockers brought up from the living room. His parents had a sizable sum in savings and Jack made trips to the bank carrying slips of paper scribbled in his father’s hand allowing him to withdraw a predetermined amount. But, lately, the account had run dry and the last bit of it wasn’t going to last after next week’s groceries.

He needed a job. He needed to make money.

Mr. Aalto—maybe equally apprehensive about traveling through the fog—had bought bag upon bag of potting soil and fertilizer and, building plywood walls and laying down a thick tarp over the tarpaper to create a large square bowl, turned the roof of his building into a small garden to grow and harvest tomatoes, peas, and squash. But he didn’t need anyone. Nor did old Mrs. Starbird, who morning after morning walked undaunted into the fog and returned a couple of hours later with bags of potatoes or oranges or a whole watermelon. The potatoes were sold ‘as is’, the watermelon divvied up into shrink-wrapped slices, but the oranges were squeezed to juice in an archaic-looking press that only produced a third-glass at a time. But she resisted his offers of working the juicer for her so that left only one last opportunity on his street: Cass Tinker of Tinker’s Toys.

Rumor might have it that Cass Tinker were dead if he wasn’t seen every Friday on his way to market in a suit, polished shoes, trimmed beard, slicked hair, and gas mask (maybe Jack wasn’t the only one convinced of the fog’s ulterior motives). He stood at five-foot-six but always seemed much taller if you happen to be coming from the other way. It was difficult for Jack to pinpoint what made Mr. Tinker so ‘huge’, though it might have to do with childhood memories of being towered over by the man as Jack, with mother usually, perused the shelves of toys in his shop and Mr. Tinker followed close behind remarking upon this or that toy’s unique qualities and limitless ‘imaginatory’ potential, always due to their existence as handmade objects. All of the toys Mr. Tinker sold were handmade, and all of them were handmade by him.

So Jack woke that morning, having decided the night before that he would bug Mr. Tinker for a job.