Hailey, startled, fell backwards on her rear. She was ten, and mushrooms had never deigned to talk to her before.

You’ve scribbled, “Not at this address” on the supermarket advertisements and set them back in the mailbox to send them back. You’ve even waved the mailman down to explain. He is apologetic and says it won’t happen again. It does.

Every autumn, the billions of maple trees turned the entire surface of the 27^th moon a vibrant red. It had happened every year since the settlers of New Earth had landed 362 years ago. Except, this year, Tiradel’s trees had no leaves.

Something in the way their too-small heads bobbed on their long necks stirred a primal, instinctive fear inside Georgie, like an ancestral memory passed down from a coelacanth had lit up in her brain.

The day that Maisy stopped believing in God, she began seeing the skeletons.

Marilka went on so many walks her arms disappeared /
regressing inside her clavicle like two large ropes /

The wind prowled the world, restless, until it skulked through a maple grove on a hill and its memory returned.

Aloe waited in the mailbox, shivering in the February freeze along with his three foster siblings, Cactus, Snake Plant, and Jade.

The door opens like tree boughs reaching for /
the sun, and you’re sure /
you didn’t move, but the floor moves you inside /
like wind buoying a bird through its branches /

Dawn pressed his lips to the horizon and Sky blushed like a schoolgirl. All pink and pastel, she twirled her birds up into the winds.

They named me Diana /
they vilify me on their news reports /
they say that I’m insane, a category five /

Every day, Niska climbed the rope ladder into the harbor of the sky to watch the cloud boats sail.

The constellation wrapping her torso—Tapez, the Winged Warrioress—flared crisp and bright through her clothes in the darkness of the late evening.

The candy cane walrus visits Olly when her parents fight. She calls him that because his tusks spiral red and white, like candy canes. She snuggles against him, and he blocks her ears with his thick coat.

The house is clean so there’s nothing to stop me /
The dishes are fed and asleep /
The curtains are bare and looking out sweetly /
The nightstands are two whiskeys deep /

Living in Nebraska isn’t so bad. The straight shot highways, predictable squares of countryside, and comforting warmth of the dimpled sun all have a kind of beautiful consistency. And though the air vibrates wrong inside my gills, and I gargle salt water to keep my throat from closing; safety keeps me here.

The whistlers wheel through the sky /
Those skeleton birds, the wind /
Playing a dirge through their bones /

Yima acquired peoples’ broken feet, stuttering hearts, and even little things like their split ends and displayed them on her wall. Once collected and dead, they morphed into their true form of a curse, a clawed thing.

The salty, pre-dawn wind wove through the cornfields, whispering of the sea, of tides and sandy shores. Arline breathed it in, and something seemed to open in her throat like the start of a question.

Her mother minced her steps like she did green onions, small and quick and determined. Her waist, trained the smallest in Faize to the width of an arm, showed the beating of her heart through her spine, and the rise and fall of her lungs, stacked atop each other.