The boy colored so hard the black crayon snapped in half in his hand.

This wasn’t uncommon with that color.

He remembered the darkness around those eyes was thick, and only the right amount of pressure could reproduce that deep, dark black.

From his seat on the hardwood floor, he pulled another black crayon from the bucket beside him and resumed coloring, furiously, hurriedly—he could hear that Mother was on her way up.

He’d done something bad, and she was mad. And when she was mad, she got mean. But he couldn’t remember what he’d done this time.

“Noah,” his mother’s shrill voice called from the stairwell outside his closed bedroom door. “Noah Nichols!”

Her footfalls made the steps groan.

Made his heart feel wrong, sick and swollen and thumpy.

He imagined her knee-length cotton skirt, thick like a curtain, swooshing upon each step, her big feet crammed into heavy shoes.

He pressed hard on the picture.

Had to get it dark.

Had to get it right.

Her voice grew closer outside the door. “Noah, I’m coming up. Someone’s been a baddy boy!”

He imagined the stairs splintering under her weight, her falling through into a dark, dusty hole, plunging into the basement where all the spiders slept, into the cellar with the snakes and guttersnipes, into the earth with the worms and the roots and the dinosaur bones, and he imagined her dying down there.

Decaying into dust.