Yesterday's Gone: Season One

people, but not quite as tall as his dad. The lobster man was older than his dad, though. His skinny body swam inside an extra large lime colored tee shirt. It billowed beneath his blue apron as it battled the beach wind that whipped around them.  
     
    The taco man looked happy enough to play the good guy in a cartoon, and his smile was so nice it made Luca feel like he’d find his mom and dad as soon as he finished eating his taco.  
     
    The spiders weren’t there because he missed his mom and dad, even though he did. They were there because so many of the animals had started to disappear. There had been hundreds, and though there were just as many now, the ones on the side of the road weren’t moving. And when they stopped moving, they got bugs all over their faces. Dog Vader, or Kick (as he preferred to be called even though Dog Vader was a much cooler name), was okay, but a lot of the other animals weren’t. And the bad numbers were getting too high to count.
     
    Luca could’ve kept walking through the night last night, but the dark was terrible scary to walk in, especially when the animals didn’t move. Luca would walk until he could’t take it anymore, then he would stop on the beach side of the highway and sleep in the sand. The other side was too close to the terrible scary — the only thing that made Luca feel like he might never see his family again.
     
    I don’t like the terrible scary. If Mom and Dad and Anna aren’t coming back, then they might be hiding deep inside the terrible scary. Animals stop moving forever once the bugs are on their faces. If Mom and Dad and Anna are deep inside the terrible scary, they’ll probably have bugs on their faces too.  
     

     
    Sleeping wasn’t too bad, though. Because that’s where he got to see his new friend. It only took seconds last night before he was out and talking to Dog Vader, who once again looked like an Indian. He wasn’t really an Indian; Luca knew that was un-possible. Dogs didn’t just turn into people. But talking to the Indian in his dream was the only way he could understand stuff, since Luca couldn’t speak barky, which is why Luca always wondered if he could really trust the husky’s thoughts in the daylight.
     
    “Why are all the animals dying?” he asked.
     
    The Indian had grown more outlandish each time Luca napped. He now wore a giant headdress, earrings that hung half as low as a hula-hoop, and a necklace made from what looked like the teeth of a sabertooth tiger. He also held in his lap a giant red plastic pipe with a white ring around the top.  
     
    The Indian took a giant puff, then said, “They are not dying.”
     
    Luca thought about the animals, both dead and alive, and how they all looked so strange. Like they weren’t really there, even though they were — equally un-possible.  
     
    Luca wished the Indian wouldn’t use so much of the confusing talk. He was trying to think of a different way to ask the same question when a second ring of smoke curled through the air, followed by, “Dying closes a circle. The animals still move in a line.”  
     
    More confusing talk. Luca didn’t care about shapes. He knew the animals were dying, plus he could see pieces of their realness missing. He wished the Indian would just tell him why, but sometimes he liked to answer questions Luca didn’t even ask.
     
    “Where did the rainbows go?” Luca tried a totally different question, hoping the Indian wouldn’t use confusing talk in his answer.  
     
    “They are there,” he said, “but you don’t need them like you did.”  
     
    Luca would have asked another question but was suddenly eating a lobster taco and staring at the one smile that swore everything would be okay. He swallowed his taco and closed his eyes, then opened them to a beautiful sky that was the exact same blue as the bubblegum ice cream he wasn’t allowed to try until he turned 10. Because bubblegum ice cream was two digits worth of sweet, at least according to his dad.  
     
    He rubbed his eyes and felt the invisible fire on his body. He was safe, even though the animals were all dying.
     
    When Dad goes to the store and then comes back, that’s a circle. When Mom says, “Let’s go to the store together,” we are moving in a line.
     

     
    Dog Vader wasn’t around when he woke this morning, but Luca wasn’t worried. They always managed to find each other. Luca began to wonder where the husky had gone when he realized he