Brandon's Mom didn't know what to do with him.

It was a really cool puzzle, intricate, colorful, and most importantly for her purposes, big. 300 pieces. 153 Disney movie characters, posed together in casual collection, as though Clarabelle Cow would ever in real life be standing next to Eeyore. He didn't mind the anachronism. He liked completeness, and every last character was there--even his favorite, Archimedes from The Sword in the Stone.

Archimedes appealed to him on a few levels. Firstly, he liked that he knew the name of a character that he bet nobody else knew. So obscure. His little secret. The other reason was that The Sword in the Stone was his favorite movie. He watched the duel between Merlin and Madam Mim so many times he remembered the sequence of transformations precisely. Snake. Crab. Rhino. Et cetera. How cool it would be to turn into something else.

Which is why Brandon's Mom thought he would be busy for a few hours, and she could get some stuff done. He was such a dervish--even for a five year old. He wouldn't so much as sit down to eat meals. Instead, he did laps around the table, eating as he went. Once she found him literally climbing the drapes. Her heart almost stopped another time when she looked out of a second story window and saw him waving down to her from a tree branch.

When she walked in--it couldn't have been more than fifteen minutes--he had that look, that "Hi! Look what I did!" look. The puzzle was done. 300 pieces. Fifteen minutes, she would swear. Brandon's Mom pulled at the hair on her temples. What could she do for a kid like this? How could she possibly do right by him?

There was one puzzle piece left over on the table, green and grey, too big for the puzzle. It clearly came from some other puzzle, a bigger one. How it got into the box, Brandon didn't know; they didn't even own any puzzles of that color or size. He looked at the puzzle, thinking maybe there was room in it somewhere.