He returned my nod with a shaky smile. “Yeah. Well, if it can’t reach us, then it may be safe to come back here. Visit it again. But if it’s just playing possum, or if it can shoot something out at us or something…well, I want you to be farther away and go run for help if anything happens, okay?”

“But why don’t we just go and…” Rusty was already shaking his head.

“I have to see more. This thing is like a miracle or something. We might never run across something like this again our entire lives.” He paused and his expression grew sadder as he went on. “There’s a lot more of life like what Dad and Aunt Karen are going through than cool shit like this. If you want to head on back, I’m cool with that. And I won’t ever make fun. But I have to see this while I can, okay?”

I said I understood, and I think even then it was the truth. But either way, I wasn’t going to leave him alone, so I told him to be careful and stepped to the edge of the clearing. The leaf devil didn’t move as Rusty approached, and my brother’s every step was slow and deliberate as he crept closer. Suddenly he stopped.

“There are rocks in the ground. Like big ones buried in the ground it looks like. They go all the way around.” He started moving left in a large circle, and as he moved, the leaf devil went with him. I couldn’t see the rocks between the distance, the angle, and the grown-up grass, but it was clear that it was moving along some invisible perimeter as it followed Rusty. It was alive, and it seemed to be trapped somehow.

Over the next week, we spent most of our free time in the clearing. Our first day back I had felt sure it would be gone, but there it was, floating near our side of its prison as though it had been waiting for us or knew we were coming. Rusty had brought a tennis ball with us this time, and after we went over the safety rules in case it suddenly did something different, we started experimenting with what it could do.