Nimia pulled her body along the underground tunnel with her muscled arms, one grip at a time. She passed the pods where other Pullers, like herself, worked, their hands plugged into the company interface.

I crossed my arms over my book, the sidewalk cool against my thighs. The emerging summer evening shimmered with a morse code of fireflies, and the orange sunlight smelled like watermelon at the height of sweetness. A perfect bookend to the day if Ranas would just leave me alone.

We point at a field of cows as we pass and say “Cows,” for as everyone knows, the bovine population has a deal with all travelers. 

She could see the ones that had come before her, and after, that had perched in the chair in the waiting room of the auto dealer shop. They superimposed over her body like layers of frosting on a cake, a finger here, a curly bit of hair there.

Poppy rambled along the highway, nodding to the bunches of Queen Anne’s lace on the road’s shoulder. They bobbed back to her, the legged flora goddess; she who had pert yellow lips and red limbs to fold up at night.

The secret compartment in the bureau slid open with the self-assuredness of a French word pointing out its silent vowels. Libby’s jaw dropped, her lips popping into an ‘o,’ and stood there with the museum’s identifying tag in her hand for a good five seconds.

Elsie skipped over the bridge in the yard, the tiny thing constructed for rabbits and mice. She pinwheeled to a stop, then dashed back over it and told her mother about the ‘black fairies’ she’d found.

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 tally-marked stop sign waited at the top of the Frankfurt street hill. Six tally marks. Police had tried cleaning them off and had even replaced the stop sign at one point, but the marks always reappeared.

The cicadas sizzled in the summer afternoon, spiraling in an erratic murmuration through the yard, and Fen dropped her sidewalk chalk to cover her ears.

The sky rotated into a yellow-green, the kind where the sun strove to shine through. Cindy stayed out in the yard. Her son texted hide in the basement! A siren wailed through the empty street. But Cindy waited. 

For our part, we love being discovered. Frieda matches us with the perfect reader, that one who holds us with interest and turns our pages with excitement. Sometimes, that person comes back to read us again, and again — for, of course, they can’t take us out of the café. 

The butterfairies and the ring-tailed dragons fled first. They buttoned up their fairy coats and looped scarves around their rings and traveled far, far into the North.

The sidewalk broke off on Filmore street, stopping as if at an invisible boundary. Jemma braked with her rollerblades a little too slow, like a seven-year-old might. She’d reached nine years old yesterday, despite her best efforts wishing on the rock she’d found under the bridge.

My mind won’t stop once I lie supine. A thousand reminders prick through from my subconscious—how could I forget the trash full of my shed skin?

The purring rumbles throughout the cathedral room. It is loud, but not the horrible, bright kind of loud that bars or doctor’s offices have. This is a cozy loud.

You know how TVs have advanced so far they show details better than real life? A giraffe at the zoo seems unrealistic and vague, like you expect it to have more pixels or something. Well, that’s how the Nebraska sky operates.

Katie had always known the time, down to the second.

Georgia dumped the 50-pound bag of cockroaches in the hole and flashed a thumbs-up to the camera man. “One of the worst environmental conundrums, f-fixed,” she said to Tommy the reporter. “And it only took us a h-h-hundred fifty years.”

The lemon of the kiss loitered on Seena’s lips so long that she thought of dangerous things. Maybe she could stay a little past the first yellow leaf, before the dew even iced over.