A day after the dinner fiasco, Callie and I are chillling in her room. She's painting and I'm sitting on the top of the easel, belting out the words to a song I've written. 

One day I'll go to heaven

And I'll bring you back a star 

Then maybe I will finally prove

How perfect you really are 

I think I'll fly away someday 

Don't worry, I'll be back soon

And when I am, I swear to God

I'll bring you half the moon

So I can love you to the moon and back 

So I can love you to the moon and back .... 

Callie reaches her hand up and lets me jump onto her palm. She has red and gold paint smeared on her face and she's got paintbrushes tucked behind her ears. Paint is splattered on her too-big T-shirt and the floor, but the painting looks amazing. 

It's a view from a nearby hill of a city on fire, overshadowed by a single mountain that's blazing. It is nighttime, and a lake shows in the distance with a town propped in the middle on stilts. A dark shape looms in the sky - a dragon. 

"What do you call it?" I ask. 

"I See Fire," she replies, touching up a few last bits before she props the canvas in the corner to dry. "It's from THe Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug." 

"I like it," I muse, reaching out a tiny hand and pressing two fingers against a dryish corner of the painting. "I think we should make a papertown of it." 

Papertown is a word that Callie and I invented. We basically recreate a scene out of paper - or wood, or clay, or whatever we have on hand - and then we snap photographs of it. Usually we post pictures on the internet and sell the completed papertown to the highest bidder. The highest price they've ever fetched is around $270 for an exact replica of the Boston Tea Party. Callie creates the majority of it but I add in the smallest of details, like carving the scales on a dragon, the feathers on a bird, painting the smallest of filigrees on building or figures in windows. 

"Alright," Callie agrees, wiping the paint off of her hands and face. "I think we've got some spare lumber in The Closet." The Closet is where all of the art supplies are kept. I baseball slide underneath the doorframe and wait patiently for Cals to open the door. She drags out several small blocks of rough wood, fingering them gently so as not to get splinters. "I think we've got enough here to at least get started on a papertown," she comments.

"We need the buildings to look like they're on fire," I say, sanding over a small block of wood with a scrap of sandpaper as Callie does the same to a larger one. 

"We should make them out of paper," she says quietly, "and then burn the paper slightly and add paper flames. That way it will look like the city has been burning, rather than it just having been set ablaze." 

I nod, giving the wood chip one last quick run-over with the sandpaper before picking up a sharp shard of razor and studying the wood. It's a roughly hewn piece of pine wood that we got cheap from the local hardware store, and the grain is flowing in a weird way. I close one eye, then the other, tilting my head and studying the pinewood. 

An image flashes into my mind - a little girl, maybe seven, running from the flames clinging to her mother's hand with one hand and reaching out with the other. A small stuffed bear will lay on the street, smoldering, forgotten in the wake of the wrath of the dragon. 

Slowly, I start chipping away at the block. Callie, meanwhile, is still sanding the large wood slab the papertown will rest on. I notice that she's leaving a slope, probably to imply the hill that the viewer of her painting appears to be standing on. We work on teh papertown until ten thirty, when Callie's mum hollers up the attic ladder for her to go to bed. 

The base of the papertown is successfully sanded away, and there are the beginnings of a street grid drawn on it with plots for buildings marked out and labeled. My figure, meanwhile, has a head, arms, and the faintest bit of an upper torso, but nothing else. We carefully tuck the pieces of wood and paper underneath a section of the floorboard that lifts up, which is where all of Callie's important things lie. Then Caallie goes into the bathroom to wash up and change as I strip down to my boxers and a T-shirt. 

My bed is an old glasses case. I sleep on a cotton-ball pillow underneath scraps of flannel and fabric, resting securely on a pile of cotton balls. Callie comes back out of the bathroom in long pajama bottoms and a t-shirt that's way too big. She adjusts the blankets around me and murmurs sleepily, "Goodnight, poclet person." 

"Night, giant princess," I respond sleepily. 

My dreams that night are a series of scattered images that leave me in a cold sweat when I start awake. 

A large man, breaking a beer bottle against the wall over the crouching body of a small child, covering her head fearfully. 

A boy with t

massive muscles snapping the arm of a girl like a twig.

A thick book, lying wide open in a drain, with three words written in bloody red on the pages: I love you. 

A limp boy's body with hick blond curls, dangling from the rafters of a barn. 

A black marble headstone with unintelligible words carved on its shining surface, and a woman crumpled at its base, wailing. 

Callie, turning and looking at me with those ocean-blue eyes and holding a light post to stay on the railing of a bridge, smiling sadly at me. 

NO! I yell, but she's already let go and jumped over the edge. 

A bathroom, filled with blood. It flows from the faucets, seeping ove the edge and flooding, staining the white marble tiles. It's surrounding me, the stench overpowering, drowning me, absorbing me, dissolving me - 

I sit bolt upright, screaming. Callie rolls over sleepily and reaches for me. "Ssshhh, Luke, Everything will be okay. It will all be alright, You'll see." 

"You .. you jumped," I sob, grabbing her shirt in my fists and balling up the fabric in an attempt to deposit myself more firmly in reality. "You were on a bridge and you jumped and ... and ... and your dad broke a bottle over you when you were small ... Some jerk broke your arms .... The same guy hung himself ... His mother was sobbing at the tombstone ... and you jumped ..." 

Callie rubs the pad of her thumb against my head and gently runs her index finger up and down my back. 

"Luke, Luke, you were having nightmares again. I promise you, nothing is going to happen to you or to me. I'm right here, you here me? I will always, ALWAYS, be right here." 

I sniffle, clinging more tightly to her shirt. "Can I sleep with you tonight?" I asak quietly. 

By means of response, she tugs her covers up higher so that they cover me. Her hand rests gently over top of me, and I fall back into a dreamless sleep.