When Aaron reached his brother, Mikey was still bent over the Russula, trying to find bugs on the mushroom’s silky pink surface. Aaron waddled over to Mikey and hopped onto the grass next to him. The ground was damp, but the grass was dry, evidence of a fading mud season and a fast-approaching New England summer.
“What are you doing?” Aaron asked, his head in his palms.
“Looking for bugs to fry.” Mikey glowered into his magnifying glass.
“Bugs to fry…” Aaron repeated. “…Looking for bugs to fry! Fried bugs!”
“Yup.”
“Mom told me to come play with you. She’s talking to the neighbors again.”
“She is?” Mikey looked behind him and saw the shiny Lincoln in the driveway. Through the kitchen windows of the old farmhouse, he could make out the forms of two silhouettes talking.
“I fell off… I fell off the banister!” Aaron laughed. “I fell off the bannister and knocked the picture off the wall. I fell off… and mommy told me to come and play with you.”
“I get it.” Mikey went back to his mushroom. “You should really stop calling her mommy. You’re almost seven.”
“But I don’t feel seven, Mikey! I feel like I’m six times seven!”
“Six times seven… Mrs. Murphy’s got you learning your multiplication tables, has she? Tell you what, I’ll let you use my magnifying glass if you can tell me what six times seven is.”
Aaron paused for a minute, then threw a clump of dried grass at the mushroom Mikey was studying.
“Sixty-seven!” He exclaimed.
“Nice try bucko.” Mikey grinned and blew the grass off the Russula.
“What is it then?”
“Six times seven?”
“Yeah!”
“Six times Seven is forty-two.”
“Forty-two… Wow… That’s how old Mrs. Murphy is.”
“Is it?”
“Yes! So, Mikey, can I fry some bugs now?”
“You really want to?”
“Yes! I had fried chicken at Matty’s birthday party last week. I’ve even had onion rings, but I’ve never had fried bugs before!”
Mikey’s eyes glinted mischievously. He hadn’t even been trying to fry bugs, but it was getting boring studying mushrooms. He glanced over at Aaron. He doubted his little brother knew what ‘frying bugs’ meant. The kid wasn’t even allowed to watch PG movies without their mother watching. Mikey glanced back at the house. The silhouettes in the window had vanished.
“Alright Aaron, I’ll show you how to fry some bugs.”
Mikey stood up and crouched over the mushroom for a better view.
“So, you know how mom and dad use matches to make fire?”
“Yes.” Aaron nodded.
“Well, this is kind of like that, only we don’t have any matches.”
“No, we don’t have any matches.”
“Right! So how do you think we can make a fire with only the magnifying glass?”
“Uhhh… I don’t know.”
“I’ll give you a hint, it involves a giant flaming ball about a few bajillion miles away.”
Aaron looked up. “The Sun!” He gasped.
“Yes, that’s right!” Mikey said, “the Sun!”
Aaron looked ahead quizzically.
“So,” Mikey paused, “How can you fry bugs using the magnifying glass?”
Aaron paused for a moment. This was more than Mrs. Murphy had prepared him for. He had just learned to read at an eighth-grade level, and he was super proud of that. He looked at the magnifying glass in his older brother’s hand. It gleamed in the sunlight unlike any object he had felt before.
“I think I know.” Aaron said, taking the glass from Mikey.
“Good! So hey, listen pal, I have a bunch of homework to do, and Tommy from up the hill is coming over. Do you think you can be careful with the magnifying glass?”
“Yeah…” Aaron exclaimed, hardly paying attention. “I’ll be here.”
Mikey jogged off, and Aaron looked at the Emetic Russula quite intently. There was nothing spectacular about it other than it was a quite beautiful mushroom. The rest of the surrounding ground was just grass and dirt. ‘How do I fry a bug with this magnifying glass?’ He dug around the mushroom and eventually made a little moat in the ground. An ant scurried across the surface of the mushroom. Aaron positioned the magnifying glass in the way he’d seen his brother using it. The ant moved past his line of sight and disappeared just beyond the mushroom’s semilunar cartilage. Aaron flipped the glass around, ready to capture a new specimen with the lens fresh for scrutiny.
Nothing happened. There were no new creations on the surface of Mikey’s mushroom. In a fit of angst, Aaron flipped the mushroom over to expose a vast colony of ants and termites. The insects scuttled here and there, and Aaron jumped out of nervousness. He looked back at the house. Mikey was gone. Aaron shined the magnifying glass against a pile of dirt that had fallen on some mint leaves. There was a curious glint on one of the leaves, and when he moved the glass, the glint moved with it..
Aaron watched the shining light following one of the termites. He chased it past the mound of dirt, past the clover, past Mikey’s Russula until the light settled back on the clump of dried grass he had thrown on the mushroom. The patch somewhat resembled the face of Mrs. Murphy, his second grade teacher. He placed the glass in just the perfect spot so that the sun concentrated on the grass.
Smoke came before the fire. Aaron tried to blow it out, but that only made it bigger. He looked around for a source of water. The pond was a good twenty meters away. Aaron jumped up. He danced around the fire, half ecstatic at his creation, half nauseous from the anticipation of his mother’s reaction. He tried blowing on it again. As the fire spread from the waterside to the meadow, Aaron decided it would probably be a good idea to tell someone about it. He ran back to the house where his mother was still entertaining the neighbors.
“Mommy, mommy!” Aaron yelled, bounding into the house. “Mom!!!”
“Aaron? What’s wrong sweetie?” Aaron’s mother emerged from the living room.
“Fire mom! Fire!”
Smoke filled the basin of the meadow and drifted up to the farmhouse. Aaron sat on the front porch as the neighbors scattered and his mother called the fire department. As he watched a flock of birds fly away from the pond, he thought about how at school, he would be known as the kid who started the fire. He thought about Jeffrey Thompson, the bully who often knocked him down on the playground. Jeffrey would likely think twice before picking on him next time.
The fire department arrived after several minutes, and by that time the flames had engulfed nearly a quarter of the meadow. Aaron’s mother came out of the house with Mikey at her side. Mikey looked down at the meadow in astonishment, then slowly turned his head to stare at Aaron.
“What did you do?” Mikey mouthed noiselessly.
Aaron shrugged. He hadn’t meant to start the fire, not consciously, anyway. The firefighters drove their trucks right up to the fire’s edge and started dowsing it with their hoses. They yelled back and forth at each other, and after a short period that felt like a lifetime, they turned off the water, and drove back up the hill to the driveway. As his mother went to confer with the man in charge, Aaron sat on the porch and studied the giant silver maple that stood in front of the old farmhouse and draped over its roof.
After a few minutes, Aaron’s mother stopped talking to the firefighter and walked over to the porch, where she sat down next to Aaron and glanced up at the silver maple.
“Aaron, what you did today was incredibly dangerous. I need you to understand that.”
Aaron scrunched his nose and kicked a rock on the ground.
“Aaron sweetie, I need you to understand that. I know you didn’t mean to do it, but what you did today was incredibly reckless. Do you understand what I mean?”
“Yes…” Aaron looked up at his mother with a quizzical expression.
“What you did, well, there’s not really a nice way to put it, it was just wrong. I need you to practice making good decisions. Can you do that for me?”
Aaron looked at his mother thoughtfully, then nodded.
“Good. Now go inside and wash your hands. Dinner’s in twenty minutes.”
His mother went inside, and Aaron sat for a moment, staring up at the old silver maple. As the smoke from the field sifted through the branches, the buds on the old tree seemed to bloom before his eyes. Aaron raised an eyebrow to the old tree, daring it to say something.
