To get to it, I stepped over an old green end table, covered in mildewed paperback books, and then a huge clear plastic bag full of Duplo blocks. I made my way across the room, but halfway there, I found that there was a spot in the middle of the garage where it looked like someone had recently cleared away all the junk and laid down a fresh blue tarp in the empty space. I was standing in the middle of the tarp when it hit me that it wasn’t dusty at all. Instead, the tarp was covered in paint drips. Fresh ones. As if someone had been working on a project and stepped away only a few hours ago. But who, and what? I looked around in every direction and didn’t see what someone might have been painting. There was nothing.

At least this spot is easier to walk through, I thought, and stepped over to the wall to reach for the cooler. But when I did, I jostled the extension cord loose, and it came tumbling down from its rusty nail and rained down right on top of me. I let go of the cooler and threw my hands up over my head, but when I did, I stumbled, and we all fell together—me, the cooler, and the jumble of orange cord.

“Ouch,” I said softly, sitting up on the tarp and brushing dead moths from my hair. I sneezed twice and wiped at the dust on my face with an equally dusty hand. Ugh.

I could only pray that Mom and Dad hadn’t woken up to the sounds in the garage. As quietly as possible, I reached over and tried to untangle the cooler from the extension cord. But when I did that, I happened to glance up, up at the ceiling, where the one bare light bulb burned. I caught my breath when I saw what it illuminated.

A cornfield.

Stretched across the ceiling, someone had been painting a cornfield. A farm. Miles of green and gold, tiny cornstalks waving in an imaginary breeze. A vast blue sky was spread over the field, shimmering with heat and sun, broken by the occasional bird. And cutting through the field was a small brown road that ran to a white farmhouse off in the distance. I sat there, on the tarp, staring at that field, lush and thick, with bits of light scattered everywhere. I couldn’t take my eyes away from it.

Then I noticed a single brown spot, lost in the sea of green. I stood up and stretched to my tiptoes, but I couldn’t quite make it out. I dragged a chair over and climbed up to peer closer. The brown spot was a head of hair, and beneath the hair was a face. It was a small boy lost in the sea of green.