The phone rang. At two a.m., it had to be either a crank caller or a death in the family. Alma found both shouting at teenagers almost as worthwhile as attending funerals. Both were instances of people needing to be put in their place.

"Luren residence." Alma answered the phone with the same tone of voice she used at school: "Montmartre Junior High, Principal's Office. He's not available right now; may I help you?" Always give the person at the other end of the line the illusion that it's business as usual.

"It's time for the Ceremony." A woman's voice, querelous, old, and grandiose attempted to boom through the phone.

Alma held the phone away from her ear. "The what?" Her hearing wasn't what it once was. She sometimes thought she heard familiar voices saying the most absurd, nonsensical things. It was startling, like opening a Christmas present from an old friend, only to find inside a live maggot tied with a bright red ribbon.

"The Ceremony..." The woman on the other end of the phone inhaled. "You have not forgotten your promise, Alma Johnson? You have not. Do not pretend otherwise." The voice sounded just the slightest bit hurt and edging toward whininess, behind the booming confidence.

"Miss Morgan?" Alma asked. "Is that you?"

The woman's voice changed. "Oh, Alma. You remembered. Hurry, please hurry..." The phone went dead.

Miss Morgan. Alma recognized it now that she knew it was supposed to be. Alma put the phone back in the cradle. Harold hadn't wakened, but that wasn't unusual. He'd trained himself to sleep through anything years ago, when the kids were young. Leaving her to do all the work, as usual. Alma organized some leftovers in the freezer for Harold, writing the days of the week on freezer tape, arranged a few other matters, watered the plants, packed, and left. At six a.m. she called Principal Heimgaard on the cell phone, explained that she would be out of town for a few days with a friend who'd been in a near-fatal accident, and gave him a list of people who might be able to fill in for her while she was out. None of them would do too much damage to her files before she returned. Despite being unable to invent corroborating details when asked (she mumbled and said she wouldn't know much until she reached the hospital), she was proud of having pulled off the fabrication in the first place.

She reached the Omaha airport an hour later. She waited in the lobby another two hours, her feet propped up on an inflatable pillow and her embroidery in her lap. (She was working on a Native American pattern to give Principal Heimgaard for Christmas next year; his whole house was decorated with the stuff.) She chatted happily with a woman from Lincoln about their adult children, who had made ridiculous messes of their love lives, but doing well in their careers (of course). Alma was able to lend a tissue to a young woman who left behind her sleeping, poorly wrapped infant in the arms of someone else--and felt comforted that she was able to do help, even if it was in such a small way. She remembered the first time she'd had to leave her babies home with Harold. Hopefully, the young woman's husband was a bit more competent than Harold. She'd given herself the nerves worrying about them, had imagined all kinds of terrible fates which she would be unable to prevent--the house burnt down, Michael run out into the middle of the street and crushed by a car, Aimee strangled with one of her crib blankets--but they had been all right, even after she'd been gone three days at a religious meeting her friend Cheryl had pressed on her. Not even God could make her leave home after that, not until the children were grown and she'd had to let them go to find their own safety in the world.

The airplane took off as expected (slightly late). One of the stewardesses received a quick but stern talking-to: a lack of punctuality should not be taken for granted. The stewardess, tied up with more important duties, agreed to pass Alma's complaint to the pilot. She probably would, too, Alma thought. All of a sudden, she started to smell cigar smoke. Alma ground her teeth and craned her neck (which had hardly had any time with which to become stiff) to see where the stink was coming from. She'd be clogged up in a few seconds if she didn't put a stop to it now.

Behind her, the seat had changed from the usual cheap, poorly cleaned blue fabric to a cracked, weathered leather. She picked at it with her fingernail and it crumbled a little. Real leather. The woman beside her (who had been so enthusiastically critical about her son in the airport) had changed, too: she was wearing a red velvet coat of some kind now, with the black crest of a horsehead on her left shoulder, over her heart. And across the aisle, a man dressed in ragged wolf pelts glared at her. His seatmate's skin was patchy and gray; he looked half-dead in his ragged clothes caked with mud.

The cigar smoke sank into Alma's lungs, and she started coughing. She reached into her handbag for a tissue and coughed into it. It was going to be days before her lungs cleared enough to breathe well, and she was sure the New York City air would be terrible for her. She struggled out of her chair (the floor was tilting back and forth, reminding her unpleasantly of the one roller coaster she'd ridden, back in 1965. The young man who'd talked her into going tried to kiss her while they were rushing around the track, and she'd vomited on him...and slapped him, too.)

But. Promises made the world go 'round. And she'd promised Miss Morgan she'd go.

Alma's brother Bobby had grown up in small-town Nebraska years before anybody knew about autism. All anybody knew was that something was wrong with him. Was God punishing him? Had Ma dropped him on his head when he was a baby, and never told anybody? Was he just being stubborn? Alma, unsure of the explanation herself, had whalloped anybody so unwise as to make a guess. He's my brother. No matter what was wrong with Bobby, that statement was enough for her to live with.

Then Miss Morgan, her first year out of teaching school, had come home with Alma after she'd beaten a much bigger boy into tears during her first math class. Miss Morgan, as frowsy and tremulous as an old lady, asked for and got permission to give Bobby some tests. It wasn't simple or easy, but she discovered Bobby's talent for numbers and found a way to bring them out of him. He went to high school for a few years, although he never graduated. Miss Morgan got him a job in Virginia working for the Government.

Best of all, she gave Alma an explanation. Nobody knew what really caused autism, she said, but what it seemed like was that the part of Bobby's head concerned with numbers had used up too much of the rest of his brain. The day Alma graduated, Miss Morgan told her two things. First, she'd tried to explain with painful awkwardness that the world isn't always what it seems. Then she'd asked Alma to promise that if she needed her for the Ceremony, she would come, no questions asked. Alma had promised, although she hadn't understood. It was Miss Morgan asking, and that was reason enough.

The airplane (which now resembled a dirigible more than anything else, and dirigibles reminded Alma of explosions) landed in chaos. Wolves made out of the innards of a junkyard skulked in the shadows of buildings, and men in featureless armor (stinking of rust and sweat) started to escort the passengers down the flimsy wooden stairs to the ground, carrying some kind of guns attached to large canisters on their backs. Alma stumbled down the stairs and gasped: the ground was covered with clotted blood. The whole city would have to be cut like a farm pig in order to bleed like this. She reached the ground and vomited on the ground. Nobody came to help her, as she would have helped anyone else in her position, ready with a wet towelette and a kind word. The other passengers rushed past her, trying to reach the safety of the building across the runway before the wolves could gather their numbers and attack. Even the woman who'd been sitting next to her walked past her, deliberately looking the other way.

Alma spat the last of the bitterness on the ground and wiped her mouth. Inside the building, she hired a kind of chariot to take her to Central Park, promising him her Minnie Mouse watch in exchange for the trip (she'd have to order another one when she got home). The roads were shattered, as if something as tall as skyscraper had been walking along the streets, its weight crushing and skewing everything as it passed. The chariot driver took her most of the way, stopping at what looked like an enormous footprint in the middle of the road, and gave her directions for walking the rest of the way. She was nearly there when Miss Morgan found her.

Miss Morgan was dressed in an elegant, flowing gown made entirely out of leaves and wore a green mask, so Alma didn't recognize her and screamed for her life when she saw the treelike figure rushing toward her. Miss Morgan wrapped her arms around Alma. "Alma!" she breathed, a rotten smell on her breath. "You're here." She held pushed Alma back to arm's length, and Alma saw that her cheeks were black with soot, streaked with tears. A second later, Miss Morgan jerked Alma by the arm and started running.

Central Park was even worse than the rest of the city, if that was possible. Dead people walked. Peacocks with the heads of spotty adolescents cackled from tree branches. An eyeless man with a bandage across his nose bit a rotted apple and licked his lips to catch an escaping maggot. An iron pot full of fire begged her for mercy. "Water...water..."

Alma couldn't breathe, was choking, and still Miss Morgan pulled her forward. "Can't stop...can't stop!" The path they followed led to a deep pool filled with black space, upon which the bleached skeletons of large birds floated and flocked. A boat had been tied at the edge of the pool; when Miss Morgan shoved Alma into the rickety, wobbly boat, she only felt grateful to be able to sit down.

The boat pulled away from the shore just as a moving pile of rock heaved out of the ground and set the straggling grass on fire. The flock of skeletons started up and flew into the trees, scattering drops of blackness that burnt like acid. The boat drifted toward a small island, upon which a wooden altar hadn't so much as been erected as grown, the grain of the wood flowing out of and returning to the ground like an exposed root.

"We're here," Miss Morgan. "We must complete the Ceremony of the Sun before sunset."

If that was the case, it was almost too late to even begin. Alma had had a chance to catch a breath. "What is it I'm supposed to do, dear? You never said."

Miss Morgan looked at the altar. "I need you to stand on top of the altar, Alma. That's all."

Alma climbed out of the boat. Her faith had brought her this far, but it would bring her no farther. She stopped. Miss Morgan pulled on her arm again, firmly.

"Now, Alma. We need you. Before it's too late."

"No," Alma said. "I promised to come, and I came. Anything more than that, you'll have to convince me."

"You wouldn't understand," Miss Morgan said. The leaves of her dress were turning brown.

"You're probably right," Alma said. She sat on the lowest part of the tree root, put her carry-on bag on the ground with a firm thump of decision, glared at Miss Morgan, and pulled out her embroidery. All she had was a plastic needle (the metal ones had had to be checked with her luggage), so she pulled out her ivory thread and started stitching. She wasn't going to move until she got some kind of explanation. Miss Morgan was hurrying her too much for any kind of sense of security...or trust.

"Alma," Miss Morgan begged.

"I didn't work as a secretary at Montmatre Junior High since graduation without learning a thing or two about dishonesty. Hah! You're no more subtle than a sixth grader with his first crush, snapping bras and making the poor girl cry. I don't know what you're up to, Miss Morgan, but it's not right." Alma bent over her embroidery hoop and added a few stitches. "Being wronged doesn't make you right." Alma didn't see the way the ground shook on the other shore of the dark pond as she spoke.

"Please, Alma. We don't have any choice!"

"I don't care," Alma said. "This is plain foolishness." Another ripple.

The sun was setting, and the leaves fell from Miss Morgan's dress. Underneath, her skin was gray bark, old and rotting. "Please, Alma! It's almost too late!"

"What's going on here?" Alma threw down her hoop. "Why can't you give me a straight explanation? What are you hiding?" This time, Alma felt the tree branch shake.

The light died out, and Miss Morgan fell. Her arms detached at the shoulders and settled in the grass of the island, exposing wood tracked with worm holes. The skeletal birds up in the trees screamed and fell, their bones shattering as they struck the ground. The peacocks all sneezed at exactly the same moment, and they fell to the ground in the form of naked boys, crying weakly. Grunting at the pain in her knees, Alma lowered herself down by Miss Morgan's body. The only thing left whole was the mask, and when Alma lifted it off her old teacher's face, she saw only sawdust and dirt. Alma had seen more of her students than she cared to remember sell themselves for some kind of idea, ending up no better than this. Rot and dirt. Ideas are worthless, Alma thought. What matters is being prepared.

With a shaking hand, Alma snapped the mask in two and put the pieces in her bag. The mechanical wolves had moved into the clearing around the pool, and seemed to be waiting for her to come back to their shore and be torn apart.

Behind her, her embroidery hoop was growing...

By De Knippling

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