Chapter Text
The young boy and his sister do their share of waiting. The lot behind the rink is empty and muddy but they wait for him anyway. They wait until it begins to get dark and then they go home. The next day they return and the pile of snow behind the rink replenishes itself, not because of him but because a loud machine driven by an acne-afflicted teen pushes slush out from inside the arena. By the third day they are filled with doubt, yet they still continue to wait. Days turn to weeks before the two finally give up. Summer is in full swing; the winter spirit will be obnoxiously late as always.
When a month passes with no word, the boy finally steals into his sister’s room, downs one of his mother’s ‘misplaced’ energy shots and pries his eyes open with tape. He hopes to stop one of the baby birds when it appears to collect his sister’s recently shed tooth. Surely they can answer his questions, or at least deliver a short message. He jerks awake the next morning, a sinking dread in his stomach, and nearly shoves his sister off the bed when he checks under her pillow. He missed them. The tooth is gone. He doesn’t play with his friends that day. Instead he runs off in the direction opposite his house, slides down the dirt hill behind the alley, and wades through the small circle of trees that lead to the pond.
It’s not frozen.
There isn’t even the slightest indication of ice tinting the edges of the water. He calls out to the sky but all he hears is the slight twitter of birds in the morning and the rising heat from summer. His heart beats fast now, something is wrong. He can feel it. Back in his room, he snatches paper and markers, pens and envelopes, and steals stamps from the drawer where his mother keeps them. His sister surprises him by tugging on his sleeve and staring quietly up at him with wide eyes. Without exchanging a word he knows that they both understand. He doesn’t miss a beat. He quickly gets her dressed before leading both of them to the library. There is a mailbox near a bench out front and he makes a B-line for it, his sister trotting hurriedly in his wake. The first thing they do is write, two letters, in entirely red ink with their names scrawled in capital letters all over their respective envelopes. He finishes first and has to help his sister with the writing bit, though she has improved at scribbling her name and insists on doing that herself. They cover the letters in stamps and hope they can make it the distance. They drop them in the mailbox and head off in the direction of the park. There they attack the remainder of their paper with urgent messages and drawings, all punctuated by a flood of question and exclamation marks. They leave their creations on picnic tables and under trees and bushes, weighted down by rocks. They scatter them in other, odder places too. Places better suited for scavenger hunts than public bulletins. They don’t know how to talk to the dream maker but every night they focus hardest on the things they hate, on having bad dreams so that maybe he will take notice.