Chalk

The Ostens’ driveway was the good one because it had been poured in one go and the Pruitts’ had been poured in three, and where the sections met the chalk skipped.

Roz was down on one knee at the top of it near the garage door, and she had the box of chalk open beside her with the pieces sorted, which nobody did.

“It stopped,” Gene said.

“What stopped.”

“The story. It was a man and a cooper and a door, and then it wasn’t. It was a different house. Different people.”

Roz kept drawing. She was doing something with a long line and a series of hatch marks along it and did not appear to be listening in any way that would hold up in court.

“So he starts a new one,” she said.

“No. It’s the same one. It’s the same story, it just — it’s the same story, it goes on, but the man’s gone and the cooper’s gone and it’s about a girl and a boat now and it doesn’t say anything happened.”

“So it forgot.”

“It didn’t forget. It didn’t stop. It just kept going.”

Roz put the chalk down.

She looked at the driveway for a second, at the part below her line where nothing was yet, and then she picked up a different color and drew a box. Then she drew a second box, well off to the right, with a good gap between them.

Then she started an arrow from the first box and took it about a third of the way across the gap and stopped it there, in the middle of nothing, with no head on it.

She sat back on her heel.

“Like that?”

Gene looked at it.

“Yeah,” he said. “That’s it.”

“Okay.”

She picked her first color back up and went on with the long line and the hatch marks, which as far as Gene could tell were a fence, or possibly a graph of something, or possibly a fence.

He stood over the two boxes a while longer.

It had taken him four tries and about ninety seconds and he had still been talking about houses and coopers, and she had done it with two rectangles and a line that stopped, and the thing that made it right was the stopping — that the arrow went out and got partway and did not arrive and there was no mark to say what had become of it.

He could not have said any of that. He also did not need to, because it was right there on the concrete and they had both already looked at it.

“You want to see it?” he said. “It’s got a whole — you can just type at it. It types back.”

“Is it like Zork.”

“No.”

“Is it like Zork but bad.”

“No, it’s not like Zork, it doesn’t have a place, there’s no — you just say things and it says things.”

Roz did not look up.

“What’s it for,” she said.

Gene stood in the driveway with his hands in his pockets and did not have an answer to that, and the question did not appear to require one; she was already back at the hatch marks, laying them in at a spacing that got tighter toward the right-hand end for a reason she had not been asked about and would not be.

“Come after dinner,” he said.

“Maybe.”

The two boxes and the arrow stayed on the Ostens’ driveway for eleven days, which was how long it took to rain.