The toy cars I found out about when I was eight or so. Not matchbox cars, which I would take out into the dirt for hours, but larger cars. About the size of a man's open hand. "Corgi" cars? Was that it? Maybe...maybe not. I was obsessed with those...for a little while. And staring into a red viewfinder for hours. Enchanted by Snoopy's foray behind enemy lines. And museum displays; the still-life windows in the walls; the full-size dioramas time frozen mid-blizzard behind glass and wolves with fish sagging in their mouths, styrofoam avalanches and glass-ripple streams on a jungle floor. Trees synthetic with steam. Cotton-ball and construction paper dioramas. Snow globes. Secrets. Long, empty, triple-crimped hallways. Books. The smell of books. A book's vanilla pages against my cheeks and the seam of the spine against my nose—rich scents awakened from a folded-up, private world.

The huge matchbox type cars seemed so expensive and well-made, and adult and...just everything matchbox cars wanted to be. They were Next Level junk. That was the old mansion that my family and another lived in. The little girl's name was Holly. I was the little boy. Those were days in upstate New York when the Legal White father came to town. Lots of Ohm signs. It was 1977. Ohm signs, long grain brown rice, and Big Toy Cars That Were Not For Kids. Buttons in each room, black for the butler, white for the maid. The buttons didn't work. If you pressed them, nobody came. The forever-mute speakers in each room were terrifying. Like the new future.

Beets. The sharp magenta-violet pool of beet blood in the bottom of the pot. And lentil soup, barley soup. Lots of soup, hot soup. Wood burning to keep warm. A bed I can't see in my mind. Clearer are dreams of falling. Sapphire blue bottles on the windowsill of huge rooms in a house that was larger than my entire childhood. Holly and I, exploring, unwatched.

In my room, there was a glow-in-the-dark skeleton on the ceiling and I would stare at it forever as I tried to sleep. It scared me but I didn't tell anyone, not even my mother. Thin ice on the Spring pond, thawing. Dreaming of rooms I would soon explore. Wheels spinning in my palms. A chair that tilted.