He heard footsteps overhead--Mom moving around in the kitchen. He blinked his purple gaze, and almost decided to make her hold still--but instead he went up to the attic, and, after looking out the circular window at the front end of the long X-roofed room for a while at the front lawn and the dusty road and Henderson's tip-waving wheatfield beyond, he curled into an unlikely shape and went partly to sleep.

Soon people would be coming for television, he heard Mom think.