And the Burby-winner in the short fiction category is . . .

The 914 is pleased to announce (and publish) our first 2025 Burby-winner, "The Invisible Manchild," by E.R. Forney of Harmon

THE INVISIBLE MANCHILD

E.R. Forney

“This is not a drill, people,” said Uncle Vince, adjusting the oversized knot of his knit tie.

Cousin Michael had just group-texted that he was catching a ride with Aunt Amanda and would be coming over after all.

“Let’s please,” Tina announced, “remember to say how impressed we are that he got his application off to Yale.”

“Keep me away from the wine,” said Vince.

“Isn’t that your vodka tonic on the counter there?” said Tina.

“I’ve never seen that glass before in my life.”

Tina made a chuffing sound and went off to brief her nieces and nephews, Michael’s young cousins.

Skylar, Aidan, Dylan and Prudence—ages fifteen to nine—were down in the 1853 farmhouse’s renovated basement watching The White Lotus.

“Your cousin Michael is coming over,” she informed them from the bottom of the stairs.

Skylar, the eldest, rolled her eyes but said nothing. It was pointless going against Aunt Tina, particularly about her weird son Michael who liked to wander around in his gray underpants pretending he was invisible.

Resistance had been attempted and was indeed futile. Michael was a genius but had been traumatized by his parents’ divorce. Michael was making progress but still required everybody’s support. Michael’s self-esteem was delicate right now. Michael’s recovery depended on them maintaining a safe, loving space. And they—Michael’s cousins—were so lucky to be normal and well-adjusted and to have the strength not only to look after themselves, but after others—others like Michael—who were not so lucky. It was actually a gift to be able to do all they could for him.

Skylar was pretty sure what they did for Cousin Michael was not a gift for anybody but Aunt Tina. And this seemed a little crazy because Tina—Tina with the Teslas and the big stone house on Campfire Road with the indoor pool and the apartments in New York and Paris—was the least underprivileged person Skylar knew.

It sure was no gift having to see their cousin’s pudgy, pale, torso—his weird, dandelion-sized nipples with the wiry hairs all around them and the disturbing streak of fur that ran the centerline of his swollen tummy from waistband to bellybutton like a pencil-swipe that had barely nicked the bubble on a multiple-choice test.

“And it would be great, when you notice—but obviously don’t see—him in the room, if you spoke to each other about his application to Yale. He just submitted this afternoon.”

“Didn’t he already go to college?” asked Aidan, thirteen. “I mean, online?”

“This is graduate school,” said Tina.

“Is he going to get in?” asked Skylar.

“Well, we’ll see,” said Tina. “But we’re proud of him for showing the initiative. It’s a very positive step. Anyhow, I know I can count on all of you.”

The children nodded their heads and turned back to the television screen except for Skylar who was looking at a text that had just come in on her phone. Dana Etzweiler wanted help with her math homework.

“Is my mother up in the kitchen?” Skylar asked Tina.

“No, I think she’s in the garden. What is this you children are watching?!”

“Thanks,” said Skylar, hopping up from the couch and running up the stairs past her disapproving aunt.

“Why not? Didn’t you tell me this morning I should invite a friend over?!”

Skylar’s mother, Susan, replied, “Yes, I did, and you chose not to. And now your Cousin Michael is coming over.”

Which was entirely the point. Typically Skylar would want Dana Etzweiler to come over about as much as she wanted to get up in the morning and go to school, which—whatever units wanting was measured in—equaled zero. But with Dana over at the same time, Cousin Michael would not be able to do his invisibility thing and maybe, if he knew an outsider was over, he would even just stay home in his attic room playing on his computer like he did all day long otherwise.

“Mom, when is this going to stop?”

“Soon. It’s just a phase he’s going through,” she said as she proffered her daughter a yellow-and-black heirloom tomato.

Skylar ignored the vegetable and Susan looked at it herself. The outer skin was scarred with a pale seam where the interior had been exposed to the mid-September air. “I don’t know why so many of them split like this. Maybe it’s all the rain we’ve been getting. Just swelling faster than their skin can grow and . . . ”

She popped it in her mouth and bit down. “Tomato stretch marks, I guess. Like you gave me when you were in my belly.”

“Mom!”

“Ummm—soooo good, though.”

“Seriously?”

“It’s too late. Tina would be upset. Michael would be upset. Next time just say something sooner, okay?”

“Mom, it’s not normal—why do we—”

“There’s nothing normal about any family, Skylar. You’ll come to learn this. They all have their quirks.”

“I don’t think there’s a single other family in the entire United States where an adult walks around in his gross underwear pretending to be invisible and where everyone—even the adults—goes along with it.”

Susan shrugged. “I wouldn’t be surprised. Oh, look, here he is—”

Cousin Michael, wearing black sweatpants and his favorite Drake t-shirt was letting himself through the garden gate at the side of the yellow farmhouse.

“Hey, people!” he yelled, mostly pulling the gate shut behind him.

Skylar knew exactly what was going on inside her mother’s head—her stopping herself from asking him to please stop and latch the gate properly so the deer wouldn’t get into the garden.

She would have asked it of any other human on the planet. But this was her sister’s special child.

Susan forced a smile as her nephew came over for his hug. “We didn’t know if we’d see you tonight, Michael—so glad you could make it!”

Skylar’s mother had been a drama major in college and Tina and everybody in the family felt she could have had a successful acting career, had she chosen that path.

“Well, I’ve been very busy,” said Cousin Michael, his squinty eyes darting about the garden. His skin so pale and his eyes, man-bun, and cotton clothes so inky against the lush garden landscape—it seemed to Skylar like God had neglected to color him in.

He embraced Susan with more vigor than she did him and then Skylar pre-empted her own hug with a fist bump.

He made an explody sound as he brought back his hand and threw his fingers wide. “Dude! You are getting so big, Sky-Sky! You still doing basketball?”

“Looks like she’s going to be starting on the varsity team,” her mother chimed in.

“Wuh-awesome! Bet you score all the time!”

Skylar shrugged and chirped, “I try!

“Mom, want me to finish picking the tomatoes so you can go work on dinner?”

“Thanks, Lark, but I think I have enough.”

Lark was her mother’s newish nickname for Skylar, who didn’t mind it, but still had not completely attached herself to it. Especially since, while she knew what larks were, they lived on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean, and were seldom spoken of here except in books.

“Dude, I’ll say” said Michael, noticing the brimming colander he had almost knocked to the ground during their hug. “Look at all those ‘maters! Whatcha making? Tomato pie?”

“We could,” said Susan. “But I was thinking maybe some nice fresh gazpacho—we have some cucumbers, dill, and peppers all ready to go.”

“Gaz-Pach-O!” he said, bobbing his big round, top-knotted head up and down. “Can I help make it?”

“Absolutely,” said Susan, avoiding eye contact with her daughter as the three of them headed to the back porch.

“I’ve got to hand it to him,” said Uncle Vince. “He plays it to the hilt.”

Since it would not be half so fun going invisible if everybody knew he was capable of going invisible (the understanding was that only his mother and Aunt Susan knew of his special ability) Michael took pains to disrobe in private.

He would tell one room he was going to see people in another room but would instead sneak upstairs, or he would go watch TV or videogames with the children and then—when they were engrossed—sneak away, or he would say he had to go finish some work and would be right back.

Tonight’s ruse involved a Facetime from a good friend he had to go take outside so as not to bother anybody. He had managed to peel almost half a cucumber before announcing this.

“Hi, Benedict!” he said into his iPhone as he pushed through the screen door to the porch.

“Who’s Benedict?” asked Susan.

“A fellow mutant,” said Vince. “Only Benedict can’t be detected by human ear or by hand, either. He’s the triple-threat.”

“What about by nose?” asked Skylar, smiling.

“Well, you see, that’s his one flaw. His kryptonite. His farts are entirely smellable—and, actually, when the gas leaves his body—”

“Vince, cut it out!” said Susan.

“—they are visible—greenish-brown clouds. So even if he lays an S.B.D., people will detect it . . . and know it was him!”

Skylar laughed.

“Yeah,” Vince went on, pleased with himself, “You’d think it was all capes and parties but Michael and Benedict are actually in an emotional support group for superhumans with visibility issues.”

“Vince, do not make a scene with Tina tonight,” Susan warned. “We only have to do this every few months.”

“Remind me,” Vince asked drily, “why we do it at all?” Susan did not say out loud what was obvious to all—it was because of Tina. Tina who every year paid the sixty-thousand dollars in taxes on the house they were standing in. And the rent for the carriage house that Vince lived in just down the road. A widowed public middle school history teacher and a book editor—seven years without a full-time job—would scarcely otherwise have been able to afford to live here in Chappaqua, at least in the manner to which they had been accustomed their whole lives. In the Guelf clan’s modern era, Tina, the business consultant with the Ph.D. in psychology—and certified New York Times bestselling self-help author—called the shots.

Through the window Skylar watched Michael, no longer pretending to talk on his phone, briefly wrestle with the door of the gray clapboard garden shed, and step inside.

“He’s gone into the shed,” she announced.

“Oh, sweet Jesus, let’s please hurry with dinner, okay?” said Vince, putting down his drink. “He’ll have to put his clothes back on for that, right? What can I do to help, Susan?”

“Well, you can finish peeling Michael’s cucumber.”

“On it!” said Vince.

“He’s coming!” said Skylar, stepping back from the window so her cousin would not see her, but not before noticing that he appeared to have shaved his torso—his chest and belly were completely hairless! He’d shaved himself! Or waxed! Or gone to one of those laser-removal places! She thought about announcing his new condition to the room, but Tina’s voice was approaching from the living room.

“How’s it going in here?” asked Tina, placing her empty wineglass on the polished soapstone counter and going to the fridge.

“One more load in the Cuisinart, and then it just needs to chill,” said Susan, referring the soup.

“And Michael’s on a phone call,” said Vince.

Tina removed a bottle of chenin blanc and slowly closed the refrigerator door.

“Oh,” she said. “Did he say with whom?”

“Somebody named Benedict.”

“Benedict,” repeated Tina, somewhat interrogatively, as she rummaged for a corkscrew in the drawer beneath the toaster. She smiled suddenly—“Ah! That’s a friend of his from the industry watchdog program he took in the spring! Great kid. Great kid!”

“You’ve met him?” asked Vince.

“Oh, well, no—Benedict’s down in Virginia, I believe. But Michael is always talking about him.”

Just then the porch floorboards creaked and Michael’s man-bunned head blocked much of the light from the kitchen-sink window. They each managed to take this in without staring and Tina began talking louder than was necessary.

“Yes, yes—I’m soo proud of Michael. He really initiated the whole process, did the research, handled all the paperwork. I barely had to do anything—except on the financial application, of course.”

“You mean this Yale program he applied to?” said Susan as she dumped another load of seeded tomatoes into the food processor.

“Yes, their environment school. It’s a wonderful program. They have some of the very best people in the world there.”

“Ah,” said Vince. “Did he apply to any safety schools? Harvard? Stanford? Southern New Hampshire?”

“He researched everywhere and came to decide Yale was the one for him. It was incredible—he looked up faculty, graduates, endowments, made comparative spreadsheets—he was thoroughly exhaustive.”

“Well, the lad’s always leaned that way,” said Vince passing his fully peeled cucumber to his sister and then raising—and drinking from—his vodka glass.

“Remember, Vince,” said Tina. “Your doctor said only three drinks a day!”

There was another creak from the porch and Michael was now standing—in just his black Crocs and gray underpants (the rule was his invisibility kicked in when most of his self was exposed)—at the screen door.

“He’s a wonder,” said Tina. “The world may not yet always recognize it, but we Guelfs of course do.”

“That we do,” said Susan, punching the food processor’s pulse button a few times and taking the top off for a taste.

Skylar looked out at the shed and let her eyes briefly sweep across her cousin Michael. It was hard to tell through the screen but he appeared to have shaved his legs as well.

“I’m going back downstairs, okay?” she said.

“Actually,” said her mother, dumping the contents of the machine into the bigger steel bowl and mixing some extra virgin olive oil in with a hand whisk. “Why not see if you can’t get the kids to go outside? It’s too nice a day to be cooped up in a basement.”

“Especially with what they are watching down there,” commented Tina.

“Okay,” said Skylar. “How soon will dinner be?”

“Well, your uncle has the kebabs ready to go, and the gazpacho’s going to need about forty minutes to chill in the chest freezer, so—probably forty-five, fifty minutes?”

“Are you thinking about Yale for undergrad, Skylar?” asked Tina.

The girl shrugged and laughed a little as she crossed the kitchen, “Me? Yale?”

“Yale would love you. The sports and the grades and your outgoing personality—”

“I dunno, I think maybe I’m more Harvard,” Skylar drawled as she crossed the kitchen.

She hurried down the hall to the basement stairwell, Aunt Tina’s shouty words following her.

“Susan, did you hear that defensive sarcasm? Listen, it’s wonderful that she’s so bright and self-possessed! But please take a lesson from my book and work on her self-esteem right now. I was going through the divorce during those years with Michael and, if there’s one thing—”

Skylar considered hovering for rest of it—she was a little curious how her mother would respond—but that was the sort of thing Michael would do. Plus, she knew her mother would nod and pretend to agree with Tina, but the whole time the corners of her mouth would be tense like they always were when she was not saying what she was really thinking, biting down on the insides of her cheeks.

“Captain Underpants is here,” Skylar announced.

“Captain Underpants?” asked Dylan, eleven.

Aidan gave her a look.

“Cousin Michael,” said Prudence, the youngest.

“Oh,” said Dylan. “Yeah.”

“He shaved himself,” said Skylar.

“His sideburns?” asked Aidan.

“No, he still has those; his body.”

“Well, he was pretty hairy,” said Aidan.

“Yeah, just remember not to stare, at least if you know what’s good for you,” Skylar said.

An older woman on the screen was drunkenly staggering on the deck of a yacht and Skylar took the remote and paused it. “Our parents want us to go outside. We can do the swing or catch frogs or something.”

“Okay,” said Prudence, stretching and yawning as she got up from the couch.

“Is Michael inside?” asked Aidan looking back towards the stairs.

“I’m sure he is by now,” replied Skylar.

“Croquet?”

Skylar nodded.

“What’s croquet?” asked Prudence.

“It’s a game where you hit balls with hammers through little wire gates and into sticks and things.”

Dylan’s almond-shaped face projected doubt.

“Aidan and I’ll be right back with the set. Stay here and look bored.”

“Why bored?” asked Prudence.

“Because, if you look like you’re having a good time, Michael might come over.”

She ushered the kids out the back door and could see now, from the side yard, that her half-naked cousin was no longer on the porch. Probably he was standing inside in a corner near an entrance to the kitchen or living room, watching and listening intently, picking his nose and ears, sometimes nerving himself to vanish a cracker or an olive or a piece of cheese from the snack tray.

She led Aidan around the house to the shed. The shingle-roofed outbuilding was filled with everything her mom used to tend the garden—spades, stakes, shovels, bird netting, fertilizer, clippers, saws, spare paving stones—as well as, gathering dust in the back corner, her father’s old beekeeping equipment. Her mother would not throw it away, thinking Skylar and Dylan might get the bee bug one day.

“That’s not a croquet set,” Aidan observed as Skylar gathered up Michael’s sweatpants and t-shirt, and then picked a brick from a small stack under the window.

“No, it’s not. The croquet set is in the garage.”

“Oh,” he said recognizing the garments and smiling. “What are you going to do with those!?”

“We are going to do this—” she tied a knot in one leg of the sweatpants, wrapped the t-shirt around the brick, dropped the brick down the tied-off leg, and then tied the other leg around the thigh of the one containing the t-shirt and brick. “And then take them to the frog pond. So nobody has a chance of finding them. Ever.”

“Throw them in the pond? But he’ll freak out—he’ll be stuck invisible! He won’t be able to join us for dinner!”

“He’s a genius, he’ll figure something out.”

“What about his cell phone?” said Aidan, pointing at the device on a shelf next to some neatly arrayed work gloves.

“Oh, good eyes. Yeah, let’s see . . . ”

If he had his phone when discovered his clothes were gone, it seemed to her, he would immediately text his mother and she would come to his rescue, would find him some new clothes, or take him home, and the whole thing would be over in ten minutes. If he did not have his phone, however, it might cause him to really panic and come running back to the house, perhaps forcing him and Tina to break the rules of the game. And that might put an end to it forever.

But doing away with Michael’s ratty old t-shirt and sweatpants was one thing. Doing away with an expensive iPhone was another. And the battery chemicals probably wouldn’t be good for the pond.

“Let’s just hide it here in the shed,” she said. “That way when he finds his clothes missing he won’t be able to text Tina and have her come help. Here, put on those gardening gloves and turn it off.”

“Gloves?”

“So no fingerprints.” If things got out of hand, she would not be surprised if Aunt Tina called the police.

Aidan nodded and did as he’d been told.

“Now, just drop it back behind those old paint cans. Like it might have fallen back there by accident or something. But so it won’t be too easy to find.”

Aidan giggled as it thumped to the wooden floor.

“Now put those gloves back,” said Skylar as she took the clothing bundle and shooed her cousin out of the shed.

“Aunt Tina would kill us if she knew what we were doing!”

“Yes,” said Skylar, “she would—if she ever found out. Which she won’t. Right?”

“Definitely not!”

“Hurry. We need to get back with the croquet set before Dylan and Prudence go complain that we left them alone.”

The two cousins jogged down the driveway to pond, flung the weighted bundle into the clear water past the lily pads, and then—after the ripples had subsided and the murky bubbles had stopped coming up—climbed the gravel drive to the garage.

At the grill, Uncle Vince and Aunt Amanda stood with Uncle Peter as he tended the kebabs.

“Look at that—croquet!” said Aunt Amanda.

“They’re good kids,” said Uncle Peter, Aidan and Prudence’s red-bearded father. “Even the ones that are mine.”

“You and Polly, and Susan and Jim—God rest—did well,” said Aunt Amanda.

“Are you saying Tina—” Vince started to say but Amanda cocked her fist.

“I was speaking of the four children on the lawn there,” said Amanda. “The ones that I can see. Which is why I named their parents in this instance.”

“Wait—does his superpower work on you?” asked Vince.

“No, of course—”

“Because he’s right over—Ow!”

“You think you are funny, Vince. But you’re not.”

“You two better keep it down,” said Peter. “He’s a moth to the flame of our amusement.”

“Has Tina thought through the fact that she’s encouraging him to be a voyeur?” said Vince.

“And not even a very interesting one.”

“What do you mean?” asked Amanda.

“I just mean, if I were invisible, well, I’d sure as fuck not be wasting it eavesdropping on my boring-ass relatives.”

“What would you do if you were invisible, Vince? Steal sips from people’s drinks?”

“I’m allergic to chardonnay and syrupy microbrews so, no; not with this crowd. But I’d at least teabag somebody.”

“Gross. And, no, you wouldn’t. Because you’re Vince. You talk big but you never do anything.”

“Damn straight,” said Vince. “That’s what capitalists are for.”

“What do you think of his manscaping efforts?” asked Peter. “That’s going to itch like crazy in a few days.”

“We hear he has plenty of lotion at home,” said Vince.

“Why, Peter, Vince? Why?!”

“Jeez, Amanda, keep it down,” said Peter. “Vince is right—you make drama out here and he’s going to come over.”

“It’s apparently a big thing with this generation—shaving off all the hair.””

“How would you know that, Vince?” asked Amanda.

“There was just an article in The Atlantic! And the upshot was that we are in fact living in a pedo-infested society.”

“Uh-huh.”

“Well thank God,” Vince went on,” Tina was clever enough to have convince him to keep his BVDs on. Can you imagine if we could see whether he’d shaved all the way down?”

“Well, remember,” said Amanda. “That is what she wants him to evolve towards.”

“The full Monty? Fuck you—that’s not really her plan, is it? I thought this charade was all a confidence thing, proving we loved him and a safe space and all that.”

“That’s a piece of it, but Tina told me part of the exercise is to help him get past his agoraphobia and body dysmorphia and become comfortable with his weight. The whole game emphasizes that clothes are superfluous and not integral. They in fact mask who we are and, while our bodies may not be perfect, they are us, and we are loved—”

Vince snorted.

“Don’t you think it may backfire a bit,” said Peter, tonging a mushroom skewer from grill to a platter. “That when he’s cured of being afraid of the wider world and worrying that he’s a hideous freak and she tells him he’s graduated from her little program and that he’s ready for the real world and tells him the truth—including that we actually saw him all the way along—he’ll be a little mortified?”

“No; because we did it out of love,” said Amanda. “And he’ll get that. That is how much we love him.”

“But we’re patently not doing it out of love,” said Vince. We’re doing it because we’re terrified of his mother.”

“Our reasons don’t matter; what matters is what he believes.”

“Do any of us believe this is going to end well?”

“These Vidalias look done,” said Peter. “Here, grab that other plate for me would you, Amanda?”

“Hey kids!” Vince yelled to the strangely quiet croquet game on the far side of the rose garden—“Dinner time!”

“This gazpacho is good, Aunt Susan,” said Prudence.

“Don’t you love it,” beamed Aunt Polly.

Tina was looking at her iPhone. Michael had failed to materialize for dinner.

“Did your text go through, Susan?” asked Amanda. “Sometimes mine say they went through, but they actually haven’t.”

“Yes, but he hasn’t replied—maybe he’s on the phone again with his friend.”

“Benedict,” Vince said with a somewhat suppressed snort.

“You kids said you didn’t see your cousin Michael outside?”

“Nope,” said Dylan. “All we saw was Skylar cheating at croquet.”

“You’re allowed to hit other people’s balls like that, Dylan. It’s the rules.”

“Nobody would make a rule that stupid,” said Dylan.

Uncle Vince considered taking issue with that statement but let it go.

“Hmm,” said Tina, “You know, I might go take a quick look for him.”

“Tina!” said Susan. “He’s fine. We saw—I mean we didn’t see—him leave the house just ten minutes ago. Absolutely nothing could have happened since then.”

“I just know he was very hungry, and he adores kebabs—”

Just then there were footsteps on the porch and Michael, still in his briefs and Crocs, hurried by the dining room windows towards the back door.

“Everybody talk normally,” said Tina whisper-shouting and aiming a big smile at the kids, “he’s still, you know what!”

“Well, how ‘bout those Mets,” said Vince, well-aware nobody but his nephew Aidan followed professional team sports.”

“Are you going back to the Vineyard again, Aunt Amanda?” asked Skylar.

“Yes, once the last batch of renters clears out,” Amanda replied.

“So, Peter, get much tennis in this summer?” asked Vince.

“Why do we have to wait till we’re thirteen to get real cell phones?” Prudence asked. Hers and Dylan’s iPhones was so locked up with parental controls that all they could do was send messages to approved numbers.

“Yeah, Mom,” Dylan said.

“I actually don’t play tennis, Vince,” said Peter.

“Ah,” said Vince. “The way you have your sweater over your shoulders like that must have confused me.”

“Are all the vegetables here from your garden, Susan?” Polly asked.

“Fly-fishing?” said Vince.

“I wish I didn’t have school and could go, too,” Skylar said to Amanda.

“School doesn’t last forever,” her aunt replied. “Speaking of—who are your teachers this year? Is Ms. Majumbder still—”

Just then Michael, pale and tentative, eyes shiny and pink from crying, tiptoed into the dining room from the kitchen. For a second, subconsciously, everybody whose back wasn’t to him stopped speaking and sent their eyes into their soup bowls, laps, or the room’s far corners.

“Well,” said Tina. “He’s got to be chatting with that friend of his. But I feel bad starting dinner without him here.”

“He won’t be long, I’m sure,” said Susan, shooing her gaze away from the roll of hairless dimpled flesh above her nephew’s constricting waistband as he hunch-walked across the floor.

If Michael noticed any of his relatives noticing him, he did not let on. He was intent on getting his mother’s attention and, in a moment, he was on her—gently tugging the shoulder of her floral dress and, through cupped hand, whispering into her ear.

Tina played it with impressive cool, barely nodding as her son spoke.

“Excuse me,” she announced. “I need to go use the lady’s room.”

She dabbed her carmine lips with her napkin, folded it, placed it upon the table, and scooted her chair back, and followed her son as he slunk back to the kitchen.

After a couple beats the screen door banged shut.

Polly, who had been sitting next to Tina, announced in a loud whisper that Michael had just told his mother that he couldn’t find his clothes.

Vince started laughing—“That’s just perfect!”

“Vince,” chided Susan. “It’s not funny.”

“Does that mean he’ll be invisible forever!?” asked Dylan.

“No, Stupid!” said Prudence. “Even if he lost his clothes, he can wear other ones.”

“Prudence!” scolded Polly.

“I should go get some of Jim’s shirts and pants from upstairs,” said Susan. Her eyes started to water and both Amanda and Polly’s did, too. Jim, her husband—Skylar and Dylan’s father—had died four years ago.

“Oh, please sit and eat, Susan,” said Amanda—“let’s see what Tina and Michael can figure out on their own.”

“Yes, as befits their genius IQs, I’m sure they’ll come up with a terrific solution,” said Vince.

A moment passed without anybody speaking.

“All right, that’s it!” said Uncle Peter. Let’s play GHOST.”

“Ooo! We haven’t played GHOST since we were at the beach!” said Susan.

“Do we have to?” said Aidan.

“Yeah, do we have to?” said Vince.

“We have to,” said Amanda.

“I’ll start—P!” said Polly and then nudged Dylan to her left.

“O.” said Dylan.

“N,” said Uncle Peter, leaving it to Skylar to either lose a point by creating a word or append a letter that forced the same task to Uncle Vince, next in line to her left.

“G!” she said with relief.

“Ha! That’s a full word!” Dylan squealed.

“Vincent! Vincent Addison Guelf! Come here right now!” Tina’s voice came in through the back door.

Skylar and Aidan exchanged a conspiratorial glance that Uncle Vince didn’t fail to notice.

“Excuse me,” he said demurely, folding his napkin and leaving it beside his empty soup bowl and half-finished kebab. “My presence appears to be re—err—demanded outside.”

“Good luck,” said Peter, raising his beer bottle.

“Do please try not to make things worse,” said Amanda.

“What’s going on?” asked Dylan.

“Aunt Tina needs Uncle Vince’s help with something,” said Prudence.

“Doing what?” asked Dylan as they heard the screen door bang shut behind Uncle Vince.

“Maybe to borrow some clothes for Cousin Michael,” suggested Prudence.

“You are so smart, Prudence,” said Aunt Amanda.

“Not at croquet she isn’t,” said Dylan.

“Dylan!” scolded Susan.

“What?” said Dylan.

Tina and Vince could now be heard shouting at each other and, after a moment, the screen door slammed again, and Vince was presently back in his seat and draining his drink.

“What’s going on?”

“My sister just accused me of hiding Michael’s clothes. Which he had apparently stashed in the garden shed. And which are no longer there. And neither is his cell phone.”

“And you didn’t take them?” asked Amanda.

“Do I look suicidal?”

Nobody responded.

“Kids?” said Susan.

“Susan!” said Polly.

“I’m just asking if they know anything,” said Susan, raising an appraising eyebrow at Skylar.

“Mom!” her daughter protested.

“Did you kids go into the shed and move Michael’s clothes?”

“No! Why would we even do that?” said Skylar.

“I don’t know why anybody would do such a thing but, nevertheless, such a thing appears to have happened.”

Polly observed her son Aidan squirm a little and joined the fray—“Prudence—did any of you go into the shed?”

“I don’t think so,” said Prudence.

“We were together the whole time,” said Dylan.”

“Except when Aidan and Skylar got the croquet set,” said Prudence.

“And,” Polly said, looking at Skylar, “the croquet set is—”

“Kept in the garage, not the shed,” said Susan.

“My money’s on Michael being up to something,” said Vince. “I mean, remember when he had that screaming fit in Woods Hole and refused to get on the ferry because he couldn’t find his Pokemon cards?”

“He was nine, Vince!” said Susan.

“And he’s now going on twenty-nine,” said Vince. “Physically.”

“What could he possibly have to gain from losing his clothes, and his cell phone?” asked Polly.

Nobody spoke and Polly adopted the same tired expression that most of the rest were wearing.

Aidan and Skylar exchanged another straight-lipped glance, again wordlessly observed by Vince.

A moment later they heard Tina’s and Michael’s voices, and then the bang of the screen door.

“I found him, everybody!” said Tina, sweeping into the room. “It seems that Michael, when he was outside on the phone with his friend, found a wild bee’s nest!”

“Oh,” said Susan, as her nephew came into view wearing the top and leggings of her dead husband’s mildew-stained beekeeper’s suit.

“Yes,” said Michael. “I hope you don’t mind I borrowed Uncle Jim’s bee suit from the shed—”

“No, of course not, Michael—and look! It looks like it fits you perfectly! You can keep it if you like!”

“We have a wild honeybee nest?” asked Dylan. His father’s beehives had long been disassembled and were rotting at the edge of the woods. “On our property?”

“Uh, I actually couldn’t find the nest,” said Michael, blushing and avoiding eye contact. “But there were a lot of them. A real swarm.”

“Sit down and have some dinner, Michael!”

“Yes, tell us all about this Yale program—we’re dying to hear more!” said Polly.

“Lux et veritas!” said Vince.

“Well, I’ve only just applied, you know,” said Michael, taking his seat between Skylar and Tina and reaching for the kebab meat.

“What did you just say, Uncle Vince?” said Prudence.

“Yale’s motto—it means ‘light and truth’ in Latin.”

“Uncle Vince had a boyfriend who went to Yale,” said Amanda.

“Yes, Cedric was big on the light, not so big on the truth,” said Vince. “Did I tell you he had a fling with Anderson Cooper after we broke up?”

“Tell us the details, Michael!” said Polly. “It’s environmental studies, is that right?”

“Actually,” he said, smearing a healthy spoonful of mango chutney onto a hunk of chicken and popping it into his mouth.

“It’s—umm, ahh, this is good, even though it’s not exactly hot any longer—umm, it’s actually The School of the Environment—it’s more to do with management than studies, really.”

“Say it don’t spray it,” Peter, on Skylar’s other side, whispered to her. She smiled.

“Susan, Polly,” said Tina, still standing. “May I have your help with something outside?”

The two middle-aged sisters got up from the table and followed Tina through the kitchen. The screen door banged again.

“What happened to the videogame design thing?” said Amanda.

“Oh,” said Michael, now slurping at his gazpacho. “I heard some not-so-good-things about that program. And jobs are tough to find these days. There’s a talent glut from India and Russian and China and places like that.”

“And weren’t you investing in crypto?” said Uncle Peter. “Your mother said you made a bundle last month.”

“Yeah,” he nodded. “But that’s when this environmental management idea came to me. I mean there are some new ones that use more a key-based mechanism where the encryption resides on a trusted server but that’s dicey because, really, the trust part. The thing with crypto is you own the full thing. But that’s where it gets so difficult with the mining and all the power you need even just to store the stuff. So, I got thinking—ooh, is that tzatziki sauce down there? Can you pass it here? Yeah, so I figured why don’t I just do something I can feel good about and that my strengths will feed into and—uh-oh, THAT doesn’t sound good!”

“Oh, sweet Jesus,” Amanda said, throwing her cloth napkin down into her chair’s seat as she hurried off to see what her sisters were fighting about.

“Good luck!” said Peter.

The children got up from the table and went to look out the window while Peter went out into the kitchen, explaining he had better keep an eye on things.

Vince and Michael remained at the table.

“Can you pass some more chicken, Uncle Vince?”

“You bet,” said Vince, even though he was sitting right next to Michael and the chicken was past his reach, too. He looked down at the platter and then at his empty glass. He had just finished his third drink and that—as he had agreed with Tina and Susan and Doctor Lookstein—was all he was allowed.

He got up from his chair, retrieved the meat for his nephew, and went off to the living room where his sister—in their parents’ antique sideboard with the big streaked mirror—still kept the liquor.

“What did you say Yale’s Latin motto was, Uncle Vince?” Michael yelled from the dining room.

Vince took a moment to respond as he watched the remains of his ice dissolve in the warm gin.

“Lux et claritas!” he shouted back, pretty certain his nephew would not notice he had swapped the Latin word for clearness for the one for truth.

“I like it!” yelled Michael. “Don’t tell my mom but, if I get in, I’ll get it as a tattoo!”

Vince loosened his tie in the mirror, undid the top button on his shirt, took his topped-off glass, headed back to the dining room, steeled for small talk with the boy wearing in his dead brother-in-law’s bee suit, and resolved to be a better uncle to the younger ones who, it was clear, had far more pluck.

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E.R. Forney has lived in northern Westchester for forty-three years and currently resides in Harmon.

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