The kid looked up. Eyes pale blue and watery.

“I can’t.”

“You mean you won’t?” Barked the older man.

The kid paused a minute, recalling the Appalachia of his boyhood. The crickets’ nighttime lullaby. The bullfrog’s moan. The leaves falling in the fall like snowflakes in the silence. His mother rocking him, singing Old Rugged Cross as he drifted into dream. His father’s expectations for more. The memory that the boy’s more was a different thing than the father’s more.

“I will not.”

A pen dropped would have echoed an eternity.

I’ve met that boy in a hundred mirrors since. He’s still sitting there, waiting for me to change my mind.

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