Author: Emily Jane Heber

“Mark! You’re digging yourself deeper!”
before turning back to Maurice, struggling against one very strong arm clamped loosely around his neck, and addressing the Shark, “and you, Maurice, have gotten on my nerves for the last time.” Maurice changes the focus of his struggling, though; and stops kicking up against the officer, though; and uses the officer as a lean-to as he lurches forward and kicks the white billboard onto its back with a low and cackling and raspy laugh (because the officer tightens the lock around the boy’s neck at this moment, because discipline follows misbehavior.)
“Yeah, that’s what I think of the flowers —” Maurice starts, but
“I think you’ve done enough for the day, Maurice,” the officer interjects, accompanied by a haunting . The officer turns on his heels, swinging Maurice in a wide circle with outstretched and swinging legs, “Mark! I really am going to confiscate the trumpet if you keep playing it! Don’t force my hand, okay?”
“I just like playing it where it’s appropriate, Officer Holden,” Mark sullenly responds, Mark sullenly wipes overgrown hair from his brow, Mark sullenly stands with white knuckles clutching a trumpet dirtied by use beyond any recognition of shine or metallic glamor.
“You can’t just play it outside when and where you please, which is why you’re here in the first place, and I  don’t want you to lose the trumpet while you learn that lesson,” Holden lectures with a still-writhing boy tucked underarm. “And you, Maurice, finally went a little too far. This is private property, and that was someone’s flowerbed, and the woman they both belong to gave me the go-ahead to take you in for ruining them.” Holden releases Maurice, adjusts his hat while Maurice unsteadily walks  towards Mark and stakes out defensive positions. “You’re both coming with me to see Captain Strong, and we’ll see where he takes you from there.”
“More like Captain Dumb!” Maurice blurts out, and Mark loses his trumpet to Officer Holden as he’s in the process of raising it to his mouth for an accompanying solo.
“That’ll really be enough from both of you,” is the last thing Officer Holden dignifies two misbehaving boys with as he escorts them thereafter-quietly from Onett’s north to Onett’s south, where a police blockade cuts off the only overland route to Twoson. Mark and Maurice whisper quiet indignities between themselves on the way in the spirit of  — two boys under the arm of the law smile because their names both start with M; and because they know each other from a spelling bee; and because they both, they admit, were only involved in a stuffy spelling bee because their fathers had encouraged them. Officer Holden walks boldly ahead while the boys linger and hover and orbit. They drift to one side, or they walk slowly; or they drift to another side, and they walk quickly, to make up for distance between them and the officer. Neither Mark nor Maurice ever make any gesture to run, nor any gesture acknowledging they  run, but Officer Holden expects this. Officer Holden smiles beyond sight of the boys behind him, because  and in this exchange, two children automatically cede control to one who isn’t.
Candy-cane legs prop up blockades that have faded from “Onett Apple Red” to orange from sun exposure. Dried and cracked leaves in similar shades pile up at the feet of officers and equipment and squad cars that form the human cleaver cutting off Onett from the rest of Eagleland for reasons “Captain Strong has declined comment on,” the newspapers read day-in and day-out. Panic over the meteorite dovetailed into a clamp-down on the Sharks spiraled into a sprawl of misdemeanor arrests that left the understaffed Onett Police working long hours and double-duty. Officer Holden checks in with the staff sergeant — turning momentarily away from his walkie-talkie for the rejoinder — and then checks in with Mark and Maurice.
“Captain Strong is busy, but he’ll make rounds soon. I need to go somewhere else too, so you’ll be under another officer’s —” and Holden introduces the man next to him, the staff sergeant, by patting him on the shoulder, by smiling broadly, “— care. This is Officer Hampton,” Holden shakes hands with him, pats him on the  shoulder, turns back to the boys, “and he’s a friend of mine. He’ll take good care of you,” Officer Holden trails off, and literally trails off, leaving midsentence and midthought because they’re only children and Officer Holden doesn’t feel the need to treat them as adults.
Officer Hampton acknowledges the boys — “hello boys” — and trails off to deal with -- "business, boys," --. Mark and Maurice tag-teamedly walk to-and-fro, and commiserate over the loss of Mark’s trumpet and the lack of , and introduce themselves to other plain-clothes civilians that are awaiting judgment at the blockade.
“I was arrested because I was wearing a mask in the library and didn’t respond when questioned,” a boy in a blue shirt and with blond hair and wearing a goalie’s mask explains. “It was a dare Frank put me up to,” he explains, and Maurice shakes his hand with a smile.
“I was arrested because I tore up some flowers outside of the library,” a brown-haired glasses-wearing boy begins — shaking Maurice’s hand confusedly — and then frustratedly, when Maurice breaks off the handshake because the boy’s story ends with, “because I was chasing down a butterfly I had seen from an inside window.”
“I just want to make it clear,” Maurice briefly monologues, “that I really don’t like butterflies.”
Mark frowns, stares quizzically at Maurice, insists “I don’t think that’s necessary,” and pats Maurice on the back with one arm while he pats the brown-haired boy on the back with his other. The brown-haired boy retreats also-frowning, and
“I was arrested because I was researching ‘Giant Step,’ and Captain Strong had questions for me,” explains a man in a tracksuit. “I just wish I hadn’t been, because I hadn’t really wanted to. I wanted to read, ‘Our Society Is Convenient,’ or even ‘Our Convenient Society,’ but both were missing from the shelf,” the man rambles to no one in particular because Mark and Maurice have already wandered off within moments of hearing that the man’s arrest had nothing to do with trumpets or Sharks (or butterflies, Mark quietly thinks to himself, smiling as he pleasantly envisions leading a parade of hovering ‘flies through the forest following him like ’the piper’ with his haunting .)
Officer Hampton notices two members of his swollen entourage asking many questions of his swollen entourage and asks two boys, “Having trouble sitting still?” Maurice immediately chomps at the bit and leaves Mark in the dust because Mark is convinced that Officer Holden left with his trumpet and that he’s never getting it back, and a dismayed Mark doesn’t feel compelled to do anything but mope in one place.
Maurice tromps forward with his gangly  and falls to the ground in a heap because Officer Hampton immediately resorts to a karate chop. Mark stands with jaw agape but says nothing because he’d rather be trumpeting (at this particular, swollen moment) and Officer Hampton ushers out the pregnant silence by remarking, “I don’t take lip, boy’ll learn. All of the officers here are just waiting for a —”
and he pauses, because his walkie-talkie is blaring, and —
“Yes, Captain Strong? … My five best men? … Sir, we have a large number of detainees here. They’ll just wander off if they’re … for a fight, eh? Alright, I’ll bring four men with me. Hampton out,” and Staff Sergeant Hampton turns to his men, and shouts, “Alright, bring her in! Frank, Boor, Barry, Thompson! Head back to the precinct and I’ll follow you in. Strong is waiting, he’s got something interesting.”
“We just got burgers, sir,” Thompson protests, holding up a still-wrapped sandwich, and quietly abandons his argument as Hampton thrusts his finger towards the looming headquarters two blocks away.
Hampton helps Maurice to his feet, dusts the boy off, straightens him up and then crowds Mark and the assembled library detainees around him. “So, you all remember why you were brought in. You were doing things that were not permissible, and were awaiting comment from the chief on that,” Hampton begins, clearing his throat, turning off his walkie-talkie with the press of a finger as it begins blaring halfway through. "Captain Strong has some … good times that require attending to by me and my men. He doesn’t have time to comment on all of  good times. Let’s leave this at an understanding, and let it be no more than that — no more  from any of you, and there won’t be any trouble.
“” Mark punctuates, humming.
“What was that, boy?” Hampton asks, and Mark slinks, and sullenly shrinks, and quietly responds,
“I was a little off-key. I was imitating my trumpet. It seemed like a good time.”
“No,” Hampton smiles, cracking his knuckles, buttoning up his leather jacket and turning towards the precinct which Barry and Boor and Frank and Thompson have already left in the direction-of. “No more good times for children today,” he ominously smirks. “You can have your trumpet back, though,” he concludes, pulling it from an interior pocket of his jacket, setting Mark aglow; “play it indoors or somewhere out of the way. Beak Point, f’r instance. No one will bother you there.”
Staff Sergeant Hampton breaks off and rushes off to catch up with his four best men, and Mark immediately breaks protocol because he is compelled: