Inside a Silver Box by Walter Mosley

things, not as metaphors or portents, not as false reality but just events she would never fully understand. One of those events was the ten- and eleven-foot-long seedpods that grew under the huge leaves of the unfamiliar tree.
    *   *   *
    T HE GREEN BIRD’S red eyes were bright beads like the scarlet danger lights on the dashboard of a car. It stared at the hapless young man and then pecked at his cheek. After this tentative attack the bird skipped back a step, afraid Ronnie might grab at it. But when no retaliation was forthcoming, it returned to its perch on his chest and pecked at the skin just above Ronnie’s left eye.
    Ronnie understood then that he would be killed slowly and methodically by this rooster-sized predator. Maybe this was his judgment; maybe this was hell, and for the rest of time, the green demon bird would eat off his face and eyes over and over again.
    The green bird cocked its head to reconnoiter Ronnie’s features.
    “Hola, hey! Get out of here!” came the bullet-fast words of Lorraine’s voice.
    The bird startled backwards, did an avian double take, and then fluttered away. The next thing that came into Ronnie’s field of vision was Lorraine’s olive-toned gaunt face with its brown and blue eyes. She was smiling down on him.
    “Your new friend looked hungry,” she said.
    She rubbed his left brow with her right hand and when she pulled the hand away, there was blood on the thumb pad.
    “He played rough,” she said.
    In his mind Ronnie grinned.
    Lorraine hopped up to her feet and hefted a huge brown canoe over her head. Her grin was magnificent and victorious. “It’s half of a seedpod from this fat tree with leaves as big as bedsheets,” she said. She rapped the side of the long and mostly straight piece of vegetation making the sound of a door being knocked upon. “It’s really hard. I’m gonna put it down on the rock right below you and roll you in. Then I’ll drag you and it down to the yellow road. Once I build up some speed, I think I can slide you along after me with no problem.”
    Lorraine moved out of sight for a few moments and then appeared again with a hard and fast grin plastered on her face.
    “Okay,” she said. “I’m going to roll you over now. If you don’t want me to, then just shake your head.…”
    Lorraine laughed and then pushed against Ronnie’s left side. He didn’t budge but she kept laughing. She moved out of range and then she was there again, ramming into him. He rolled once, twice, and then was in free fall until he came to a jolting stop inside the pod.
    It was a tight fit and he was on his side looking at the silvery, hairlike fur that was there to cushion the seeds before they scattered out to become trees.
    “That was a good shot, huh?” Lorraine said.
    She pulled and pushed against his inert body until he was mostly on his back in the coffinlike space.
    “The hardest thing was,” Lorraine said, “finding one of these pods with a curved stem that I could get around my shoulder. Watch out, it’s going to be bumpy on the way down.”
    Ronnie felt the pod being raised from somewhere up beyond his head. For a few seconds he was bouncing back and forth inasmuch as the confined space allowed and then he came to a halt—momentarily.
    The sky overhead was cloudless and the sun was nowhere in sight, but its radiance was evident in the leaves of the trees that surrounded him. The pod wavered this way and that, and then it was moving, making the hissing sound of a sled being dragged through snow.
    At first they went at a sluggish pace, slower than a normal walk. But slowly they picked up speed until Ronnie felt that he was in a gypsy cab in the early morning after a night of partying up in Harlem.
    Snug in the giant seedpod, moving as fast as an automobile under an azure sky, with the swishing sound of the pod against the ground blocking out all other sound—Ronnie felt a contradictory sense of freedom. As long as he could remember, he’d