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.

Lobsters don’t die from old age /
They just get tired of moulting and shouldering /
All the necessary sadness a being needs /
To move from shell to shell /

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 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.

Cover your ears, child /
Hear only the trees now /

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. 

Rory slogged through the field of plastic, swinging her metal detector like a divining rod. If she dug up just a dollar fifty more in change, she could buy a full week’s worth of rations instead of three days.

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.

Men also love scalp massages /
and trailed fingers in their hair /

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 crimson leaf pile near the street drain /
Has a picture of reasons for you to skip down the walk /

A phantom muscle in my brain /
Works on weekends and overtime /
To convince me that I’m imminent /
Just that, imminent /

Our heads house living things /
Dreams born and buried as we sleep /

Fireflies, wandering eyes /
Blinking through the popular trees /

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.