Billy carefully places the red and yellow maple leaves in the blue plastic pail of dirty water. He is sitting in wet grass; the air is cold and smells like fall but his face is so close to the water that all he can smell is its mud and new leaves. He is six and so old enough to know that he has bones inside of him. Playing in his leaves under the tree he thinks about the thin bones fanning out from his wrist to his knuckles. He studies a turnip-coloured leaf, fingering its webbing and stem and then places it into the pail. He tries not to think about the hard snap of twigs breaking that has been echoing at the base of his skull lately.

His mother's gray face leans against the window. She doesn't watch her son or the harsh orange sunset that has started to break through the maple trees and houses on the street. In the deepest part of her bones cells have been separating off into thriving colonies oblivious to both the sky and her son so that now her skeleton is brittle.

Louise Iris next door sits on the back porch looking toward the boy instead of the table leg she has been brushing over for the last several minutes. The sticky brush has started to streak the layers of new white paint. She teaches physics and chemistry at the highschool so she know the universe has been expanding since its first bang. She believes it will contract and then bang and expand. She sees it convulsing on forever like a heart. Her husband, Stan, is in the kitchen. He teaches English at the same school as his wife and is dipping plastic plates in greasy water. He tries to think about John Donne because he's tired of thinking about his wife. Failing, he looks out the window and stares at the soft line of her neck curving into her shoulders underneath her flannel shirt and he wants to go outside onto the newspapered porch and sit ontop of the half painted table and open the shirt and bury his head into the warm space where her neck and collarbone and shoulder meet. He wants this desperately and clenches the plate with sudden resolve. He opens his mouth.

"Are you hungry, Lou?" he asks, "Should I heat up the tuna casserole?"

Louise's arm stops suddenly, she stares at the brush. "Yeah."

The orange sunset above and behind her has become red so the houses and maple trees seem to be breaking up a fire. Louise still stares at the white paint at the tip of her brush.

Billy's white tennis shoes are soggy. He has been wearing shoes since late July. He has spent three summers at this house, in this yard. It is as far back as his memory goes. Last summer was the first he has had to spend in shoes. In the middle of summer the trees in back grew fat green apples that ripened off their stems onto the ground. In the August heat they became brown and soft and mashed under tennis shoes, lingering in the cracks of the soles. The apple mash fermented and smelled sweet and heavy and drew wasps. Billy's grandfather, who had moved in to take care of his mom and was too tired and busy to rake up apple mush, and the mom who was too sick and brittle.to even eat apples, made Billy wear his shoes to protect him from the wasps and rotten apples. Now, in the fire of an Ohio sunset, he wonders if he should go back and fetch the deep purple apple leaves and put them in his leaf soup. He decides yes and gets up from his wet leaf pile and heads toward the back.

Louise notices this even though she has been pouring her concentration into the white paint. She wonders why she has been staring at the paint and why it has been making her so frightened as she realizes, suddenly, that she has been painting the table leg in strokes of terror. She also wonders why the little boy is going into his backyard. She wonders why he is so quiet and why their yard is filled with bowls and buckets and pans of wet, browning leaves. She wonders about the whole quiet household next door; the grandfather and mother and son. She knows about the bone cancer and wonders what she should do--bake a cake and say sorry you're sick--how long do you have? Should she send a card? a casserole --yes--maybe she should send a casserole--maybe she should wait until the mother dies? a casserole for after the wake so the grandfather wouldn't have to cook and the little boy would have something warm to eat. A tuna casserole would be good. Suddenly, Louise wonders what Stan just said to her. Thinking about Stan, she remembers that she half hates him and tries to come up with something else to think about but before she does she feels a tiny, inexplicable shudder of fear. It is then that she notices the red sky.

The mother, also at that moment, notices the red sky and she wonders where her son is as she can't see him from the front window anymore. "DAD--WHERE DID BILL GO OFF TO?" She yells into the kitchen.

Her father, heating vanilla pudding in the microwave calls back, "HE'S GET..." He walks into the living room, "He's getting apple tree leaves again." The cycles of radiation and chemicals have finished so now his daughter has hair again and the sight of the soft dark curls touches him. He thinks of her as a little girl. He remembers braiding her hair and wonders if it will grow long in time for him to braid it again. The probably not hits his stomach like ice and he is embarrassed by his hope.

Louise, embarassed, wonders again what Stan had just said to her. She is hungry and thinks about starting dinner. The sky is the color of red nail polish. She remembers the nails of one of the cashiers at the highschool cafeteria. Last year, because of those nails, she slipped out of the cafeteria to eat Mexican food and discovered Stan and began to hate him. Louise Iris never ate Mexican food because the spices and the grease gave her gas. But the cashier's red fingernails reminded her of her mother's garden and the fat red tomatoes that would bud from the hairy vines and would open into intricate mazes white and red and would taste cold and sweet as the orange watery juice would dribble down her face. She was suddenly disgusted with the thought of her chicken salad bagel. She left the cafeteria and went to Casa Juana. Stan had been pestering her to try it with him on their Friday night out. But he was at a conference somewhere in Indiana that Friday. About John Donne maybe. He was discussing hard tangly poetry she did not understand or like at a University she had never heard of. He was gone so the day seemed to be hers entirely.

Thinking about the possibility of Mexican spices and spending the day alone with them seemed thrilling. Louise remembers walking into Casa Juana. The memory of why she half hates Stan stings her hands. She thinks about her expanding universe heaving. The sky has softened into a dusk that is blue and gray and seems like a thin curtain hiding the stars.

Billy's mom begins to call him in because the sun has set but instead asks her father to turn on the porch light. The nurse that morning had given her morphine but now she hurts and is tired. "Dad, you think he needs another sweater?"

"Nah, it's warm for October." Her father looks out at Billy lost in leaves and pails of water. "Has he always spent so much time playing in the leaves?"

She shakes her head no. "This is the first time. Did I use to do that?"

Her father says no. She worries about her son. Her father says he's quiet at school and by himself. He never brings friends over and never goes over to friends. Watching his small head bend over the blue pail with his sad concentration she shakes inside. She remembers how she felt when she learned she was pregnant. She was thirty five and recovering from her divorce, eating but not tasting oreos for all meals of the day. The day she realized her period was a week late she was frightened the way seventeen year olds are, searching the inside of underpants for any sign of blood, praying. But on the second day, when she bought the home pregnancy kit and discovered she could be a mother she felt her insides shaking. She felt dizzy and concentrated on the pulse of her breathing but the shaking wouldn't stop. She stared at the cup of still warm urine that had given her the secret code. Bellow her ribs, under her belly button, bones and lips and fingers were forming. Through the window she sees those fingers rub wet maple leaves and nothing, not her bones, not the dimming sky, not the expanding universe, is enough to contain her rage against her skeleton's mute cell colonies.

In the thickening dusk, Louise shakes with anger remembering walking into Casa Juana. She walked into the restaurant with the joy of a woman who was forgoing the world of soupy chicken salad and entering, for the twenty minutes she had for lunch, the world of exotic salsas and chilli peppers. But there, in a vinyl and plastic wood booth, there sat her husband and one of the school's secretaries who always smelled like sweat and lilacs and dressed like a parrot and always said when her husband passed her in the halls "Stan the man--there's Stan the man--there goes Stan the man." There the woman sat with her mouth open. Her husband, her Stan, was feeding this woman. He was putting something lumpy and brown into her mouth and he wasn't even using a fork. Louise felt the scene like a blow to her face. She whispered "Stan?" They both looked up. She ran out. At home, she called the principal complaining of freak back pains, and then locked herself in the bathroom. She heard the screech of Stan's tires, his footsteps into the house and then his banging on the bathroom door. "Lou, come on we can work this out. She didn't mean anything. Lou open the door. come on. Lou? lou..." His voice strained like something breaking and he left. She thought about breaking furniture, exploding the microwave, hurling plates. She stayed in the bathroom for twelve hours. Stan was already asleep when she entered the bedroom to tell him that she was going to move in with her sister, at least for a while but possibly forever. But the sight of Stan asleep, on his stomach, snoring, moved her. She saw the indentation at the base of his head, the curve where his spine met his skull and she wanted to rest her hand in that curve and stroke his hair. She did not touch her sleeping husband. It was hard to breathe and Louise believed that she would be forever drowning in her husband's tendernesses, hating him.

Casserole---Stan had told her about the casserole. Louise feels herself drown and instantaneously feels terror clench the base of her neck. The sky is dark but she thinks about the white paint.

In the yellow half light from the porch's lamp Billy squints toward Mrs. Iris. She is next door, on her porch. It's the first time in a couple of hours that he's looked up from his leaves and he feels from the motion a little relief. He feels himself breathe. He notices that he's cold and wonders if Mrs. Iris is also cold. She doesn't seem to have a coat on but he can't tell for sure; he can only make out her silloutte. She is on her knees squatting next to a table. Her head is bent over a paint brush. It is too dark to see her face but Billy notices the haunched set of her shoulders. He knows she is scared. He knows how necks and backs tighten themselves in panic. His shoulders are sore. Mrs. Iris is now getting up and moving the table in but her shoulder's are still clamping toward her neck. Billy wonders if he should ask how are you doing? are you ok? but then looks around at the shadowy yards. He knows that the neighbor's leaves are raked and brown and dry. Grandfather comes out.

Stan has finished preparing the casserole and turned on the porch light which diffuses the night and stars. Because of the light Louise doesn't see the clear autumn moon. But she sees again the whiteness of the half painted table she has begun to move inside and in a shock understands her terror. Next door Billy is screaming at his Grandfather. Louise remembers last night and Stan who has, in his shame, become very frightened of moving onto her side of the bed. She remembers Stan's tense fingers inching over in some strange act of courage toward her hair. She stopped faking sleep and hissed "Stan the man." His hand stopped dead.

That night she dreamed of an expanding universe containing Stan and her on a rock. The air around them was white; the rock was heaving itself into sections that flew into the white air. Both she and Stan were quiet as the sections they each stood on broke away from the main rock and it wasn't until she stared into the blankness and couldn't see Stan that she screamed. Because of the blankness, because of Stan's absence, because of the inevitable contraction that would hurl them back together again.

On the porch, under the night, looking at the table instead of Stan, Louise wants to scream again. She opens her mouth and hears the sound of Billy's shattering scream.

"Nononono--the leaves--their bones--they're mush." Billy gasps and screams again. Stan runs and with Louise sees that the blue plastic pail, overturned by the grandfather foot as he bent to drag Billy inside. In the dark they can only see the shadows of the disintegrated leaves. Billy kneels in the grass, running his hand through the rumpled shapes of the leaves he had tried to preserve. He can't find any stems. There are no fine leaf bones. He is crying hysterically. Louise imagines that under her feet she feels the ground shudder in a universal heave. She grabs onto Stan and feels warm and steady. Billy is cold and shaking and knows that the ground couldn't have heaved. Beneath his hands he feels the wet ground dissolve.