The Slippery Map

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Chapter One

The Awful MTDs
(Baltimore, South of Pratt Street)

It had been a fearful summer. Mrs. Fishback had told the nuns so. She got her news from the mini-TV that she brought with her each morning when she came to work in the nunnery kitchen.

"The Awful MTDs," Mrs. Fishback told the nuns over lunch on this one particular day. Her pudgy nose flushed with agitation, and maybe a little joy, because Mrs. Fishback was the kind of person who enjoyed a fearful summer. "Mysterious Temporary Disappearances. Kids, always kids, disappearing! Poof! Just gone! Then time passes and poof! They're back! " She explained with great relish how one girl had disappeared into her Hula Hoop. She was from the next town over and went missing for thirty minutes. Her mother was holding the hoop in her living room, weeping, with the police all around, and then the girl bounced back out of the hoop, like she'd been given a good shove.

Mrs. Fishback continued on from her perch on a kitchen stool near her mini-TV and the phone where she made all official nunnery calls, patting the fatty rump of her dog, a dachshund named Leatherbelly who had a narrow snout and labored to breathe. "Two more kids disappeared into tire swings, another into her grandmother's sofa cushions. Four minutes gone for one. Three minutes missing for another. A boy in Arbutus was gone three hours after stepping into a box that had packaged a refrigerator." She smiled brightly through the tender description of the whole town gathered around the box, keeping vigil till he was belched back into the world. "Alvin Peterly. Poor boy!" She shook her head. "And who knows what will happen today? Maybe one will disappear for good!" And then she added, with terrible glee in her voice, "Wouldn't that be awful?"

Mrs. Fishback hated children even though she had seven of them. (Or perhaps because she had seven of them; it's hard to say with some folks.) If she wasn't spouting off about something horrible on the news, she was complaining about her children, who were all grown now and lived far away—as did Mr. Fishback. That didn't stop her from griping that the children and Mr. Fishback had always been too messy, too loud, too costly, too rude, too runty, too slow, too feisty, too dull, too whiny, too piggish, too foul. She often said, "I should have thrown all of them out on their ears!"

She had taken the administrator job in the nunnery a few months earlier because, she assumed, there would be no children in it.

She was wrong.

This nunnery was home to thirteen nuns and one ten-year-old boy named Oyster.

As you know, ten-year-old boys aren't supposed to live in nunneries. Right now you might be saying to yourself, "Nuns are supposed to live in nunneries; that's why they're called nunneries!" Well, yes, true, but life is odd, you know, and you can't be overly rigid about the English language. (Nurses don't live in nurseries! Novels don't live in novelties! No, no. And they don't just live in novelists either; they live in hearts, you know, and everyone's got a heart.) Plus, it wasn't strange to Oyster to be living in a nunnery, even this nunnery where all of the nuns had taken vows of silence. He'd lived in a nunnery ever since he could remember, ever since he was an infant dropped off at the nunnery's gate wrapped in a Royal Motel towel and placed in a Dorsey's Pickled Foods box. This was his home.

And he was in the kitchen this very day, putting his soup bowl in the kitchen sink, in a row of nuns who were also putting their bowls in the kitchen sink. And it should be noted that when Mrs. Fishback had said, "Maybe one will disappear for good!" she'd looked at Oyster, her eyebrows bearing down so that her eyes—a cold, vicious blue—looked hooded and shadowy in a grim way.

Mrs. Fishback had it in for him.

And at this point, Oyster didn't need anyone having it in for him. You see, the nuns had quite loved Oyster when he was a baby and when he was a cute little boy. But he was now ten, and that was a different thing altogether. He'd gotten older and antsier every year, and this summer he just couldn't stand his quiet nunnery life anymore. He wasn't able to hold himself back.

For example, when no one was in the chapel, he jumped the pews front to back like a hurdler. Once, because he could resist it no longer, he pulled the rope on the giant bell in the belfry and went riding back and forth and all around under the bell's skirt, flying, feeling like he himself was being rung and not the bell at all. Another time he'd pumped the organ—which was off-limits because it was much too loud. He simply couldn't resist it any longer. Dust spouted up from its pipes until the long notes rose in a sonorous mishmash. And he was growing a tadpole in the holy water. It was wrong, yes. But the tadpole was so happy!

The nuns, on the other hand, were not so happy. There was a complaint box drilled to the chapel wall, and the nuns filled it each week with complaints about Oyster, which were discussed in a flurry of note-scribbling at a weekly meeting that Oyster wasn't permitted to attend. He would read the notes later, however, because he was the one in charge of dumping wastebaskets, and he would sort through the notes in his room. The main thing was this: they wanted him to be more nunlike.

One had written: Does he see us jumping pews, pumping organs, riding the bell cord in the belfry? No, he does not!

There was only one nun who always stuck up for him: Sister Mary Many Pockets, as he'd named her early on because of the many things she always had in the many pockets hidden in the long skirt of her habit—rosaries, peanuts, scissors, tape, cough drops, a tennis ball—anything, really, that you might need.

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Excerpted from The Slippery Map by N. E. Bode
All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.