"Would they still love me," he asks the blank-space shadow behind the statue, "if I did awful things?"

The child squats in the dirt behind a low wall, singular intensity holding him unnaturally rigid. His hands are pressed to the ground, where one fingernail pierces through a leaf, pinning it to the dirt.

This is the place to speak in whispers of impossible things, here where a brutal sun makes a jagged black duplicate of himself on the ground.

He conjures the answer like a storyteller does, pretending it comes from this silent woman cast in stone while she looks blindly and resolutely away.

Later, when he sleeps, the picture of him is different. Total unconsciousness blurs his hard lines and smears over his intensity.

He is never changed, though--what he clutches during sleep is not a soft animal with cares and tears sunk into its cloth, but a sharp-cornered, hard-edged thing like him. His fingers have slipped between its pages, perhaps holding a place, perhaps saving him a place as one of these people in this book, one of the people who journey and fight and always stay together.

His dream is not really the same as the book he reads, because even while dreaming, he cannot change to be someone else. But it does not really matter. Every night, he slips between the pages of his very own self-woven story.

In his dream, he has done awful things.

And in his dream, they still love him.