The boy, her son, Albert, had been a beautiful child, wide-eyed, curious—awake at odd hours. Albert had spent most of his time with his imaginary friend V—he described him as a purplish creature who liked Jell-O and playing “Rat Killer Detective” in the run-off drain that ran adjacent to the house. Other than V, Albert had no real friends but was seemingly unaffected by the separation between reality and unreality in that he genuinely understood living was performed in the moment and not in some distant future or murky past. This made him seem old. Whenever Albert saw Elenore, no matter what machinations he was involved in, he would come running, and, if he could, would find ingenious ways to leap into her arms. This was Albert—happy to be where he was.

Sometimes one finds Albert, just-appeared, a full-figured form across the street with a sippy-cup in his right hand walking beside V. Both V and Albert always look both ways before they make it across the street; they stop at the mailbox and each time Albert introduces V to Elenore, the purplish creature smiles with jagged teeth in an upturned mouth, while the boy gathers the mail—good Albert. Then, he deposits the mail in her hands, and Albert and V turn away after waving goodbye. Dear, dear Albert.

Now, Elenore waits at the mailbox for Albert and V to appear. No Albert, though, just V standing on his furry legs, waving at her like some H.R. Pufnstuf. 

“Where’s Albert?” she yells across the street.

Elenore waits a moment longer, and when V just stands there silently, she repeats rudely, “Where’s Albert?”

V’s this Muppety creature who had been a part of Albert’s imagination, and she had indulged that imagination whenever she could. She had, after all, set up the cups for the tea party, and helped Albert make tea for his special friend. And, Albert had tried to introduce V to her on many occasions. Elenore had done her part as a mother and had looked right through V as if he were there. Albert had been increasingly unsatisfied with her response and had, for a while, requested only purple clothes and purple shoes and purple hats so maybe she could acclimate herself to the wide and various purple prism of colors that composed V.

“To let him know we love him and he is welcome.” The irony was not lost on her when Albert confirmed that his favorite color was green, but still, he would only wear purple.

And then, when wearing purple clothes did not produce the desired effect, one day Albert asked his mother for rat poison because the rats in the sewers had made babies and then the babies had made babies and so on until there were so many rats that they could make a movie. Well giving a child rat poison was definitely not in the Good Mother’s Handbook and Elenore refused and she made sure to call Esther and tell her to refuse, too, even if Albert and V brought her cookies. And this was funny, kind of, if it weren’t so serious because Albert found the rat poison anyway and put it in the teacups and he and V invited the rats to the tea party. “They drank and drank and were dead by high noon,” Albert said. “I didn’t feel good about it, but it had to be done because of the plague that took the kids in the Pied Piper story that I read to the rats out of the picture book. I think they understood but that didn’t make death any easier. NO!”

Satiated, the rats all crawled off into the sewer with bloated bellies to die and then in Biblical proportions the flies came to feast on the rats and the feasted flies got as big as quarters and were angry to boot. They swarmed out of the sewer’s great mouth and the rat killer detectives had to find a solution to save the neighborhood from the sixty-five diseases they carried including typhoid, cholera, and intestinal myiasis.  And there were pinworms, roundworms, and tapeworms. Albert once heard a girl in his fourth-grade class had a tapeworm as long as her arm and she had to be dewormed with apple cider vinegar and pumpkin seeds because her mother didn’t believe in medicines. He told Elenore he didn’t want that.

Albert was ingenious, really, and out of the fly strip of his imagination created the Fly Stand. He doused himself in her lavender perfume and challenged the sewer and collected the large horse flies that had hatched and hovered about his head like bullets. Elenore had to admit that Albert had a way with the flies. He told Elenore that both he and V spoke in a special buzz saw language and that calmed the flies that he named: Yacht and Aught and Naught, Sought, and Caught. Come to think of it, as Elenore stood there facing V, the creature looked like a fly—purple and green with that weird beard and those popping eyes.

Albert continued to collect the flies, coercing them into purple-colored jars he had uncovered in the basement. When his father was alive, they used to place lighted candles in the purple jars and line them up on Red Coach Road on Christmas Eve. The luminaries gave off an eerie purple light and were supposed to guide the Christ Child to people’s homes.

Albert used a rusty awl he also found in the basement to punch holes in the lids of the jars. He informed Elenore that he planned to sell the flies in jars like other unimaginative kids sold lemonade. He set up the card table that Elenore sometimes used for bridge in front of Red Coach Road beside the mailbox, and he made a sign “Fly Stand, Inquire Herein.”

Elenore had no intention of stifling the boy’s creativity, but this was too much. Besides, it was gross and unhealthy in both sanitary and psychological terms.

First, V; then, Rat Sewer Detectives, then the rats, then the poison, then the flies and now this—A Fly Stand: the selling of jars of flies, right on the street and right outside the house.