More and more of the children were disappearing. In the sky over the bay, an unusual formation looked like a hole of clear blue sky punched in the clouds. A cloying presence was felt in the normally gay streets of Jazz Age Alameda. It wasn’t just the unusually high humidity that turned San Francisco Bay into a milky cauldron of billowing fog, it was a vague fear like having forgotten something you can’t call to mind. It was an easy environment for anyone to get disoriented in, let alone children. Perhaps they would return.
But the lord giveth as the lord taketh away. Unclaimed children, abandoned by their parents, overflowed the orphanage. One who had left her daughter’s room exactly as they were the last time she was in the bed, finally relented and gave homes to children from the shelter. They were, for the large part, as most children are except… The only way to put it is to be quite blunt. They were mad. They took the world of comic books to be quite real. Some of them had mirrors where the silvering had come completely off and they claimed that they were two-way wrist communicators just like Dick Tracy had, but of course they didn’t work. They missed their mothers terribly, languishing at night about missing laptops. She thinks they may be refugees from a group of people who have been imprisoned. The term they use is internment, but their youth causes them to mispronounce it “internet.” The Great War displaced and dispossessed many people, so she worries less about where they came from and more about what she can do to help ease their shell-shocked minds.
Everyone crosses a bridge, goes through a tunnel or pays the ferryman to get on the island. This was a criss-cross. Children, perhaps because they’re not yet firmly anchored in space-time, traveled from the Old Island to the New Island and vice-versa. An old man, dressed in the height of the fashion of his youth, stared at the sidewalk through the window of the tea house on Park St. He finally saw them in 2016.
They were smaller than he remembered. Well, than the photographs he remembered. Their parents had taken good care of him and now he was bound and determined to return the favor. He stepped outside and called their names.
“Mister, you’re the first fellow I’ve seen who isn’t dressed strangely. The sign says we’re on Park St., but everything looks so different. How do you know our names? Are you friends with our parents?” Little Milo Menhauer asked.
The old man nodded. Milo’s parents had taken him in after he had disappeared from the new island. The old man would make sure that these two boys got to his own parents’ house before grief over the disappearance of his younger self drove them mad. The forged documents and trust accounts he had for them eased the expense, but not the pain, of the separation.
Literature in Small Doses 