The boys had got off to themselves, escaped the husky section at an opportune moment, scrambled past the rows of junior miss, down through the petite, always skirting unmentionables. They’d got off to a spot clear of their mother’s wrinkle-eyed stare. They’d got off to a spot clear of everything, in fact, despite never having left the mall to their recollection.

Tracing the crescent of the horizon with his finger, the older boy noted an absence of features in any direction. The ground was hard, flat, and brown. The sky was clear and only gave the slightest hint of being blue. “Ain’t nothing here,” he said. The younger boy nodded.

Exploration proved the boys wrong. One something was, indeed, present. A shifting foil of heat rose from the ground at just such an angle that it nearly vanished when the boys stood anyplace other than directly before it, and suspended above it was an illuminated “EXIT” sign, equally difficult to view from an angle. “Reckon it’s a portal?” said the younger boy. “Accourse it’s a portal, numb-nuts,” was the elder’s reply.

The younger boy sulked off a little. “Go cry!” said the older boy. “Ima see where this goes all by myself, and that’ll leave you all by yourself.”

“You’re the numb-nuts,” said the younger boy. “You can’t tell nothing. That just goes back to the mall.”

“You don’t know. Besides, I got the gift certificates. So, even if it is the mall, I can spend’em however I want, and you’ll just cry.”

“You take that back,” said the younger. “I won’t,” said the elder. “It’s my money, too,” said the younger. Then came the hitting.

Absent their mother, the two had proved a violent combination in the past. There’d been many a bloody ride to the emergency room in the family hatchback, many a maternal sobbing fit lobbed at remorseless, brick-wall faces. The family’s psychologists were constantly befuddled. “Boys being boys,” one had remarked, “exceptionally violent boys, off course, but boys just the same.”

The two rolled across the sterile, brown surface, taking turns at dominance and beating. They rolled and rolled and rolled, yelling, punching, and being punched until once again discovering a bit of somethingness in the surrounding emptiness. The environment lacking landmarks, they had no way to tell how far they’d come. There was also the issue of the rage interfering with their capacity for critical thought. All they knew for sure was that they hadn’t seen any of this from where they’d first been standing.

On a patch of flat ground no different than the rest had been planted a sign, which read, “EXPANSION! COMING SOON.” Beneath the bold lettering had been spray-painted the words, “summon grizzly bear tornado,” in green, glittery paint. The spray can had been discarded beside an open toolbox containing electrical tape, assorted rusty tools, and some sort of gauge of some sort. “A barometer,” said the older boy, breathless. “You are,” said the younger boy, also breathless.

The older boy twisted his face in anger, no longer concerned with the structural beginnings of the massive, somehow translucent, construction project looming just beyond the sign, and fished quickly into the toolbox for something with a sharp edge. He managed to grab a box-knife on his first go, but as he fumbled with its latch the younger boy was able to grab a weapon of his own, a dull chisel with a stubby, wooden handle. The resulting duel saw few connecting hits, but they were a brutal few. What a display of hungry, destructive capacity it was. The workers on the high steel above stopped to watch, even.

The boys took no notice of the pale figures, so light that they seemed to disappear into the off-sky colored works upon which they stood. No, the boys took notice of nothing but the breaths each had taken, telling gestures, edge angles, and potential advantages or escapes. They were machines. It wasn’t until the younger boy landed a solid thrust in his brother’s gut, pushing past the dull resistance and into the sickly warmth beyond, that the spell was broken. “I’m telling mom,” said the older boy, before collapsing.

The younger boy began to cry. The workers above returned to their construction, the sounds of their tools, their riveters and cranes, rattling through his ears like a rainstorm making love to an aluminum shed, pitch-shifted into nearly inaudible frequencies. He spotted them for the first time but questioned nothing of what he saw. It was clear in some way. Expansion was a necessary thing, after all, no matter the plane.

Despite his flagging strength, the younger boy set about dragging his brother to the exit. The older boy was fading quickly, semi-conscious and spouting nonsense about the spread theorems of celestial mathematicians, the secret brokerages of Obsession and Shame. “Tell me about dad,” said the younger boy, wrestling against inflamed lungs and a cramped chest to produce the words.

“They say he pissed diesel fuel and sold power ties in the back alleys of the roughest blocks,” said the older boy, taking what seemed like hours to complete each word. “They say even men and women of action conceded right of way, regardless of their pressing schedules. When he was thirteen he surfed a chimney stack, brick and mortar and still smoking, down a mountainside after blowing up a cabin fulla Kodiak poachers. That’s what they say. I don’t know, though.”

The exit sign flickered upon their eventual return to the portal, the source of its power fading, perhaps. The younger boy checked his brother’s breathing, which, though weak, remained steady. Blood had begun to run from the older boy’s mouth, and the dragging across the ground, despite its smoothness, had done nothing to help his condition. As he allowed himself the rest his body demanded, the younger boy scanned the distance for the sign they had seen, for the building, for any feature. There were none.

With the last of his strength, now nothing more than mechanical will, the younger boy hoisted the elder to his feet. The older boy began to fall, but a compromise in stance was achieved. Standing now, arm hooked around the neck of the younger boy, he said, “Tell mom I was foolin. Teller I still like beans from a can. I got this blood, though, I think.”

The older boy went out, and with his consciousness went what little balance he’d been able to muster. The younger boy was able to control their fall, however, and the two toppled through the portal, half in, half out. A scream accompanied their return and several more followed, each as unbelievably sharp as the first. Their blood staining the grout of the busy food court, the two were swept into a torrent of concerned activity, too confusing to understand from within. A constant theme throughout the confusion, however, was the familiar sobbing of the boys’ mother.

“Why?” she said, holding the hand of her youngest as the ambulance rocketed them through rush hour. At first he offered only silence, but he eventually added, “Throw a rock at a grizzly bear tornado, mom. See how much good it does you. Also, Danny still likes canned beans. Me, too.”

Timestamp: 05.02.07 at 02:27 PM. Filed under: Fiction.