Another Vacuum

Sunday was gray with a hint of sun straining past the clouds.
Puck went flying down the driveway to get into the car and landed face-forward, scraping the top layer of skin off a patch of his underarm.
“I ok! I ok! I ok!” he called back to Collette.
Collette washed his arm and slipped a bandage on the scratch.
“Tick?” Puck asked, pointing to the band-aid.
He had never worn a band-aid before, and wasn’t sure what, exactly, it was.
Puck amused himself with his newest vacuum cleaner, a piece that OLeif had carved for him out of a block of wood at the Silverspoon’s the previous afternoon.
“Thank you, Daddy!” Puck had cried when he saw it. “Thank you! Thank you, Daddy!”
On the way to church, Puck was busy looking at the sky.
“Look!” he cried, pointing at the sun. “A big moon!”
Then Collette explained that it was the sun. And OLeif told him not to look at it.
“Don’t look at the sun!” Puck told himself, over and over, shielding his eyes with Donkey.
After everyone had returned from church, Francis was talking about how he and Creole had made napalm.
“With gasoline and Styrofoam,” he was saying. “It’s the best invention since the bomb. You can mold it into any shape and throw it against a wall and it’ll stay there, and keep burning, even though it’s not on fire.”