Further Joy by John Brandon

outnumbered than they are now.”
    â€œYou’re going to live here, just like that?”
    â€œWell, I’m retiring. When people retire, they head south.”
    â€œYeah, but there are places more south than this,” I say. “Places that don’t have… what we have going on.”
    â€œExactly,” he says.
    We’re under a few massive old pecan trees, birds flitting branch to branch above us. It’s the middle of the day but it’s dim here in the shade.
    â€œIsn’t it against all religions to lie?” I say.
    â€œFirst of all, there’s a lot of gray area in my line of work, religion or no. Second of all, yes, it is.”
    â€œIf you were Catholic, you could lie and then go to confession and admit it and it’s like it never happened.”
    The investigator shifts on the bench. He’s not going to stand anytime soon. He’s probably not going fishing. He’s going to be one of us.
    â€œI’m a native,” I tell him.
    I watch him nod appreciatively. “I know it. And natives like you speak well of a place.”
    â€œI think confessing sounds fun,” I admit. “You go in that wooden booth and nobody knows it’s you.”
    â€œSomebody always knows it’s you,” says the investigator. “Someone’s always totting your omissions.”
    That night my parents head over to one of the towns to see a movie, an old-fashioned date sort of thing. I practice juggling for about an hour in my room, a skill I’ve been trying to pick up. Then I listen to music in the parlor for a while, a subdued jazz record my father is partial to, but I can’t get sleepy. I go to the kitchen for a glass of milk, but instead I find myself rummaging in the drawers for the spare key to my father’s studio.
    It’s a flimsy key, not full size, like a key for a file cabinet or something. I find it in a junk drawer underneath a calculator and a tape measure, and then I slip out the back and walk across our shadowy little yard and fit the key into the doorknob. There’s a palm tree growing right in front of the studio, leaning down over the entrance. When I open the door it shushes against the hanging fronds, and there’s the shush again when I close it behind me.
    I’ve been in my father’s studio many times, but not lately. I know there’s a pull cord for the light, and I grope around above me until I find it. With the place lit up, I can see that everything is the same as I remember. The walls are bare white. There’s a case of mineral water under the drafting table, pencil shavings scattered around on the concrete floor. The air smellslike things heated, things overused—hot glass and leather and stale coffee.
    On the table is the book of all my father’s sketches. There must be a thousand of them, in clear plastic sheets. On the page that’s showing there’s a three-dimensional drawing of a clock tower. One wall of the tower is filled in—with irregular, soft-looking bricks—but the others seem like they’re transparent, so you can see that inside the tower, on the floor, is a pile of heavy chain. I look closer and there are cuffs attached to the chain, like to hold a person prisoner in a fairy tale. The clock has numerals but no hands. I turn to the next sketch and it’s the same drawing. There are small alterations—the size of the clock face, the shape of the bricks. Next page, the same thing again, but now the tower is stouter and instead of a pile of chain there’s only the cuffs, moored directly to the wall.
    The studio is shaped like an L. I still my breathing and listen for a car out on the road. When I hear nothing, I go down around the corner, and what I see, arranged on a pallet of plywood, are a dozen identical metal eggs. They’re about two feet tall. They’re not eggs, though—they’re shaped more like tears, or a moon that’s begun to