That next hour was all kinds of mixed up, now that I try to remember it. After such a "large" summer, one so grown up in so many ways, I remember one thing especially a lot: there I was, with the source of all the unexpected thinking and viewing and trusting and maturing ("Growing up is just like growing down, Ellis; people just call it different stuff on different days..." my pal George had said to me weeks before that, and I thought it made the inevitability of adulthood a WHOLE lot more attractive at the time). And we were playing! No rivers. No words much. Nothing more than handing a pair of scissors back and forth, giggling, cutting up old pajamas, wrapping crazy-colored pipe cleaners around the necks and middles of things George called butterflies. I think, for the first time since June, I really, really, really felt like a "kid" without worrying about how it looked. And, I suppose, I saw George there looking "special" (a word that had taken on more than a million layers) without worrying about that, either.     

   Between us on that musty basement floor, in a secret corner to the left of an idle furnace (and underneath a bare light bulb with a spider web hanging from it -- that I still can't remember as anything more than daunting, no matter how I color the recollections) there was a bridge of nothing more, nothing better, than painless silence and butterflies-under-construction. And I remember feeling very guilty at having felt afraid of George as we climbed down those creaking stairs. I felt mighty bad that I forgot that a friend is only as important as the degree of trust you put into them. And, for reasons I'd never have seen coming prior to that blisteringly hot summer, I trusted George just right. And he trusted me to trust him, too. I could tell just by looking at the incredible sincerity in his eyes as he cut and shaped scraps of cotton and silk. As he formed the wings of a boy AND a man's butterfly. And he didn't mind my noticing.
   Just like the way he looked at the rivers in his arms. And the rivers in mine.
   I finally broke the silence. "Why butterflies, George? I thought you liked sunflowers. Birds. I didn't know you liked butterflies!"
   He didn't lose concentration as he answered: "Remember that time I told you if something needs done, you just have to do it. Figure it out as you go. Do it right?" I did remember that ... but we were talking about repairing roofs on that nearly forgotten occasion. Planting gardens. Being perfect (or appearing as such). Important things. Nothing like pretend bugs!
   "Butterflies needed done, it seemed to me. So I learned how to make some." Simple as that, he'd concluded the "aim of the day". He didn't even have to explain it, either (I was on the program, by then). House repairs, Irish songs, roofs over one's head, sunflowers in July, muddy bicycles, flannel butterflies? They were all kind of the same thing. Different corners of what needs done at the time you do them. And, despite the lack of complicating the heck out of it, it made perfect sense, in terms of a day.
   He looked at me and a boundless large grin crossed his face (but still no laughter, never that). He picked up his newest creation (green-bodied and purple-headed as it was) and threw it at me. Seeing as how I got to be 12 again I picked up MY creation (bright orange, with a black pipe cleaner and one button on its butt) and threw it back at him. This went on for minutes (hours?). An odd display of fireworks-like missiles, colors unlimited, flying back and forth between two sizes of similar people, but either one no larger or lesser than the other one. And neither caring who was who, I might add.
   It was then that George Thunderhack picked up his green/purple crumple of nothing much and got a peculiar and slightly sad look on his face, as he stared at it there in his right palm.
   "Whatsamatter, George?" I asked. I thought he needn't be sad in the midst of all of our silliness.
   "Now my butterfly will have to die someday..."
   I was crestfallen to hear him say that. He was never, and I mean never, a gloomy or sad man (as far as I knew).
   "No. It isn't real, Göran. Just a ...."
   My heart (and I'll never EVER forget the feeling as it happened all that time ago) stopped, then, just long enough to make my head swim and my blood feel hot. I looked at George's butterfly, a chap he'd fleetingly (and for no sensible reason, that I could tell) called 'Sidney' just minutes before that. And I knew that my rivers were about to cause a mighty flood, somewhere in the continent that was me.
   Sidney twitched, without help. Then "he" twitched again.