When Bunny finds him there’s bark in her hair and snot on her Wagon Wheel polo and she yanks him to his feet and Seymour could not say if a minute or a month or a decade has passed. The owl vanishes like smoke. He twists to see where it might have gone, but it’s nowhere, sucked deeper into the woods, and Bunny is touching his hair, she’s sobbing, “—about to call the cops, why didn’t you stay put?—” she’s swearing, pulling him home through the trees, ripping her jeans on the barbed wire; the microwave timer in the kitchen is going boopboopboopboop, Bunny is talking on her phone, she’s getting fired by Manager Steve, she’s throwing her phone at the love seat, she’s squeezing Seymour’s shoulders so he can’t squirm away, she’s saying, “I thought we were doing this together,” she’s saying, “I thought we were a team.”

After bedtime he crawls to his window, slides it open, thrusts his head into the dark. The night exudes a wild, oniony smell. Something barks, something goes chee chee chee. The forest is right there, just past the barbed wire.

“Trustyfriend,” he says. “I name you Trustyfriend.”

Zeno

Downstairs adults clomp through Mrs. Boydstun’s living room in their heavy shoes. Five Playwood Plastic soldiers climb out of their tin box. Soldier 401 creeps toward the headboard with his rifle; 410 drags his anti-tank gun over a furrow of quilt; 413 gets too close to the radiator and his face melts.

Pastor White labors up the stairs with a plate of ham and crackers and sits on the little brass bed breathing hard. He picks up Soldier 404, the one with the rifle held over his head, and says he’s not supposed to tell Zeno this, but he heard that on the day Zeno’s Papa died, he sent four Japs to hell all by himself.

At the bottom of the stairwell someone says, “Guadalcanal, now, that’s where?” and someone else says, “It’s all the same to me,” and snowflakes float past the bedroom window. For a split second Zeno’s mother sails down from the sky in a golden boat and while everyone watches, stupefied, he and Athena climb aboard and she sails them to the Celestial City, where a turquoise sea breaks against black cliffs and lemons, warm with sunlight, hang from every tree.

Then he’s back on the brass bed and Pastor White is frog-walking Soldier 404 around the bedspread, reeking of hair tonic, and Papa is never coming back.

“Bona fide honest-to-God hero,” the pastor says. “What your daddy was.”

Later Zeno sneaks down the staircase with the plate and slips out the back door. Athena limps out of the junipers, stiff with cold, and he feeds her the ham and crackers and she gives him a look of pure gratitude.