She carried a large cardboard box with her small, seven-year-old arms stretched beneath it and a tiny chin resting on the top. A concentrated face was accentuated by silky blond hair that wisped across her bright blue eyes.
George Sandros was a retired school-teacher who lived down the street from Sally. He was busy clearing the last clumps of snow from his wet driveway when he noticed his young neighbor walking in his direction with the oversized box. Mr. Sandros was a friendly neighbor who had taught sixth-grade for 38 years in the same classroom of the small Illinois town where he and Sally lived. He had retired four years earlier, before Sally was old enough to have had him as a teacher, but he had taught both of Sally's parents, and both of them had considered him one of their most beloved teachers.
Mr. Sandros was an indefatigable optimist with a pure love of children, a love bred from his romantic attachment to the magical mysticism of youth--something he had never lost touch with himself. His classroom had been a laboratory for the imagination, a place where words like no or can't were seldom heard. In it dragons were born, the dark side of the moon was explored, Chinese ladies ate pickle sandwiches with Napoleon, and apples grew on grapevines made from jumprope.
It was a final outpost of childhood. In the summers between the sixth- and seventh-grades, students changed. They would leave his classroom in late May, filled with innocence, optimism, and imagination, then they would return to the school in August with boyfriends, basketball jerseys, and pre-algebra books.
As Sally came closer to Mr. Sandros's house, he called out to her.
"Hey there, little miss! What cha got it the box?"
"A dwarf."
"Oooh," he replied. "What cha gonna do with it?"
"Gonna let him go."
"Can I see him?"
Sally put down the box and opened the flaps. In the corner sat a large, wet, shivering rat.
"Wow! Where'd you catch him?"
"Under my sandbox."
"You didn't touch him did you?"
Sally looked up suddenly at Mr. Sandros with a worried look on her face. George could see that she had touched it.
"Did he bite?" George asked is a playful tone, trying to preserve the mystery of the experience while at the same time looking out for Sally's safety. But he was well-practiced in this art, and he betrayed to her none of his adult sensibilities.
"He's a nice dwarf," Sally replied. "He doesn't bite."
His eyes moved to her fingers, and satisfied, he continued the conversation. "Where you gonna put him?"
Sally pointed down the sidewalk to a clump of bushes at the dead end of the neighborhood lane in Jennifer Collins's front yard. It was no more than a patch of weedy hibiscus and wisteria that Walter Smith had planted for his wife twenty-odd years earlier. But now both of the Smiths were dead, and the house was left in possession of their three children, who rented it to a single woman in her early twenties. Neither Jennifer nor her landlords took much care for the property's upkeep, so the grass was always long, and the landscaping was overgrown from a decade or so of inattention. For most of the adults in the neighborhood, the house was an eyesore and embarrassment, but at least it was conveniently located at the end of the lane where traffic never passed.
The neighborhood children, on the other hand, found the property to be a place of fantasy. All summer long, bikes lay on their sides at the end of the road next to Jennifer's house as kids played hide-and-seek and sundry other hiding games in the bushy habitat of the unkempt yard. Parents allowed this because it kept their children at the quiet end of the neighborhood, away from traffic and other sorts of trouble, and besides, Jennifer was almost never home to be bothered by the commotion. Even when she was home, she was pleasant enough to be completely uninterested in stirring up trouble with the neighborhood families and never made complaints.
Mr. Sandros looked down the street toward the budding wisteria.
"Yeah," he said. "I think that is going to be the perfect spot for him."
Sally stooped over to fold down the tops of the brown box, enclosing the small rat-dwarf in darkness. Then she picked up the box, stretched her arms beneath it, and secured the top with the bottom of her chin.
"Do you need help?"
"Nope," she said.
Sally walked away, and George resumed clearing his driveway. As he scooped ice and dripping slush from the concrete, he laughed to himself to think how upset Mr. Smith be if he knew that neighborhood kids were hiding rats in his wife's wisteria.
He was still grinning when Sally returned minutes later with the box.
"Mr. Sandros?" Sallly called. "I think my dwarf is dead."
George put down his shovel and looked inside the box to see the wet rat sitting in the same corner where he had been a few minutes earlier. He shook the box, and the rat didn't move. Wearing his garden gloves, he reached into the box and poked the ball of cold, damp fur with his finger, and he could feel that its body was already stiff.
"Yup," he said with a smile on his face. "I believe you're right."
Sally did not appear to be sad, but she did not seem to know what was to be done with a dead dwarf. George watched her as a sudden breeze blew between them.
"You know what? I got just the place for him in my garden. Do you wanna bury him back there with me?"
Sally nodded yes.
Picking up the box, she followed Mr. Sandros to his back yard garden. George retrieved a spade from his work shed and dug a small hole in the wet ground beneath a rose bush. Sally opened the box, placed the dwarf in the hole, and covered it with clumps of dirt. When the job was finished, Sally and Mr. Sandros stood looking down at the small mound of black mud.
From the corner of his eye, George saw a sparrow flit across the yard and disappear into the soffit of his work shed.
"I know it's just a rat," Sally said.
"I know," Mr. Sandros replied.
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