Children with disabilities -- Fiction; Florida -- Fiction; Psychic ability -- Fiction; Science fiction; Short stories
Produced by Sankar Viswanathan, Greg Weeks, and the Online
Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net
Transcriber's Note:
This etext was produced from Fantastic Universe March 1954. Extensive
research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this
publication was renewed.
[The history of this materialistic world is highlighted with
strange events that scientists and historians, unable to explain
logically, have dismissed with such labels as "supernatural,"
"miracle," etc. But there are those among us whose simple faith
can--and often does--alter the scheme of the universe. Even a little
child can do it....]
to remember charlie by
by ... Roger Dee
Just a one-eyed dog named Charlie and a crippled boy named
Joey--but between them they changed the face of the universe ...
perhaps.
* * * * *
I nearly stumbled over the kid in the dark before I saw him.
His wheelchair was parked as usual on the tired strip of carpet grass
that separated his mother's trailer from the one Doc Shull and I lived
in, but it wasn't exactly where I'd learned to expect it when I rolled
in at night from the fishing boats. Usually it was nearer the west end
of the strip where Joey could look across the crushed-shell square of
the Twin Palms trailer court and the palmetto flats to the Tampa
highway beyond. But this time it was pushed back into the shadows away
from the court lights.
The boy wasn't watching the flats tonight, as he usually did. Instead
he was lying back in his chair with his face turned to the sky,
staring upward with such absorbed intensity that he didn't even know I
was there until I spoke.
"Anything wrong, Joey?" I asked.
He said, "No, Roy," without taking his eyes off the sky.
For a minute I had the prickly feeling you get when you are watching a
movie and find that you know just what is going to happen next.
You're puzzled and a little spooked until you realize that the reason
you can predict the action so exactly is because you've seen the same
thing happen somewhere else a long time ago. I forgot the feeling when
I remembered why the kid wasn't watching the palmetto flats. But I
couldn't help wondering why he'd turned to watching the sky instead.
"What're you looking for up there, Joey?" I asked.
He didn't move and from the tone of his voice I got the impression
that he only half heard me.
"I'm moving some stars," he said softly.
I gave it up and went on to my own trailer without asking any more
fool questions. How can you talk to a kid like that?
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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