Lazarus

I Meet My Future Self and She Asks Me

What are the pretty places you want to see?/ I step outside and the sun is warm/ there’s a light breeze/ fresh cut grass/ it smells like spring/ the bay of daffodils around the block has emerged from winter’s slumber and I see their pale yellow faces on my walk/ bright sunlight bounces off the snow/ I see it melt into muddy patches of spring/ I see people around me with joy and not with distrust/ I trust myself/ What does it feel like to live in a dream?/  I walk into the kitchen and my grandma brews me chai the way I like it without me asking/ I read poetry outside along the river and the birds sing along/ I peel an orange, the rind and pulp digging into my fingernails/ I grab chalk and write what I’m too scared to say/ in lavender, orange, lemon, lime, ruby red/ I tell my needs without feeling ashamed/ I learn to speak to you without embarrassment for not having the right words/ I become fluent in all the tongues of my past, present, future/ We make marzipan in your blender/ You give me a hug when we say goodnight/ I wake up and don’t think of all the people who have hurt me/ I write them out of the story and let myself breathe/ I decide not to talk to anyone for a day and let myself eat alone in the restaurant/ I eat three meals a day/ I go on a walk and call my friends even if it’s only for ten minutes/ I wake up at dawn and roam all the streets of the neighborhood/ the world slowly bathed in light/ I dance in the street/ my hair falls in loose waves and I feel/ content/ What’s the most beautiful version of your life (realistically)?/ my family gathered around the worn yellow dining room table, talking so much the walls cannot cradle anymore sound/ We share and swap/ clothes, secrets/ I have my friends’ go-to drink saved on my phone/ I go to the cafe and ask where you are so I can drop off the drink I got you just cause/ $5 large tangy mango smoothie/ I look at my body and I’m really proud of what I see/ I celebrate my wins and cry if I want to/ I buy myself flowers/ I light the three-wick soy lavender candle every night for a year/ I wear a chunky wool sweater as I read in the morning sunlight/ We go to the farmer’s market on Saturdays, browse the cheeses, have a picnic/ I find the cheese from Montserrat and don’t throw it out this time/ I lean over your shoulder/ to read off the same book as you/ I write you letters and we develop a language all our own/ I say hi to my neighbors/ We play just dance in your hotel room/ I host a party and feel like there’s a world beyond the four walls on the fourth floor/ the song stuck in my head plays from the speakers and you grab my hand and twirl me/ What feeling would you bottle up and save for later?/ adrenaline kick as the stage lights turn on and everyone cheers/  pink and effervescent/ I reach out to meet you & I hope you like me/ I melt into the tight hug that lingers after we pull away/ You take me out to visit our old high school after I left years ago/ I got on a train and never looked back/ and I end up having a fun time/ You help me shed my shell/ I open the blinds and smell the damp porch moon rain/ gulps of fresh air/ I laugh ‘til my sides hurt/ swinging on the playground/ I find an outfit that makes my eyes sparkle/ I find your favorite band’s poster and your eyes sparkle/ I enter a room and it feels like I’ve been there before/ I learn to feel at home wherever I am/ now/here/ if it isn’t me and you then who else would it be? 

A Recipe for All Five Senses

The air and my fingers smell bitter and I can taste the humid heat on my tongue. That’s just how these afternoons are––a rusty electric fan older than I am is set to oscillate and alternates between cooling the skin on my arms and rustling the layers of papers and pictures stuck with magnets to the refrigerator. The constant, lower drone of the stovetop fan stirs the air, and I can feel the vibrations through the igad between my legs.

My lelang is sitting at the old, yellowed kitchen counter talking on the landline to someone from church. She laughs and gossips between English and Ilocano––apparently, someone is newly pregnant and wasn’t at service yesterday. The phone is pressed between her shoulder and her ear as she picks the malunggay leaves from their dainty green stems. Malunggay leaves aren’t bigger than the tip of your thumb but her long nails, always painted the same nude beige, are perfect for the job. She lets the stems fall into her lap. They are bright green against the purple and white pareo she’s wearing. I started working with lelang, sitting on her lap between her arms, to pick from leafy branches of my own, but I gave up after my fingers start turning green and I could almost feel the leaves’ uncooked, sour flavor through my skin. I am reassigned to the igad and given two halves of coconut to shred for the dila-dila. Though I miss the smell of lelang’s perfume, I am glad to be free of the tedious work; the white plastic colander was almost full of leaves by now anyway.

Lelong is at the stove chopping garlic and ginger. To his left, bones and skin are simmering into chicken broth. There’s a Rainbow Wahine volleyball game on the TV in the living room and lelong occasionally cranes his neck to get a glimpse. He’s wearing his vintage Rainbow Warriors Football tank top, faded green, the old rainbow logo from the 80s across the back. There’s always a University of Hawaii game on TV when lelong cooks, whether it’s our family spaghetti, guisantes, pancit, or chicken malunggay like today.

Chicken malunggay is my favorite and even though we’re just getting started with the cooking, I can already imagine the warm, golden-green smell of the leaves, the chicken, the garlic and ginger, and the fresh rice. It is a miraculous dish. When they prepared it was the only time I ever saw both lelang and lelong in the kitchen cooking at the same time. It was their culinary marriage: lelang would fill the colander with hand-picked leaves from our tree in the backyard and lelong would transform the ingredients into the salty-sour, comforting elixir of a night at my grandparents’ house. My stomach rumbles. I can barely wait for dinner.

I turn my attention back to the task at hand: shredding coconut. The igad is tough between my legs and digs into my tailbone but the low satisfying grating sound of the coconut flesh against the round serrated blade is oddly satisfying. I position the well-worn aluminum pan beneath the blade and cup the outside of the coconut half with both hands. The motion is almost like the motion of petting a dog’s head from front to back, but I push downwards, with both hands, and instead of soft fur, it’s the rough, hairy coconut shell against my hands. For dila-dila, the strange feeling of the coconut fur and aching butt of sitting and grating is well worth it: fresh mochi covered in shredded coconut topped with a heap of brown sugar is a sinfully delicious combination.

By the time I’ve grated both halves down to the shell my wrists are aching, and the sunset mountain drizzle is pattering on the leaves and bushes outside the open kitchen window. The rows of old glass soda, beer, and wine bottles on the windowsill catch the final rays of the sunset and shine like they’re full of starlight. I sit, mesmerized for at least five minutes until the sun sets and the Prussian blue completes its conquest of the sky. Lelang spirits away the tray that I’ve filled up and starts coating the mochi for the dila-dila. Dila means “tongue” in Ilocano, she always reminds me.

The malunggay is well underway by now. I hop up and over to the stove, peering around lelong’s back to get a look. The soup is beautiful, green and gold and white, the malunggay leaves glisten with the fat from the broth and the chicken looks tender and rich. I scrutinize the contents of the big silver pot, searching for the chunks of ginger that catch me off guard every time and make me pucker my lips and squint my eyes closed as the earthy spice fades. I can never seem to avoid getting a chunk in at least one bite. Lelang is already getting out the old china, probably the same bowls and plates my mom and her sisters ate out of. She tells me to wash my hands.

I hold lelang and lelong’s hands across the huge, lacquered table while termites and tiny months buzz around the ceiling light hanging above the dining table. Lelong’s hands are rough and dark, like worn leather. I think about how we would sit with cans of Hawaiian Sun juice at the bench on the side of the house. He would tell me stories of working in the sugar cane fields. Lelang remembered the pineapple fields more, at least that’s what she told me. Her hands were wrinkled but soft, she lotioned them every morning and every evening.

We pray together in Ilocano: “Apo umay kad' kadakam', ditoy 'yan mi a panganan. Taraon mi bendisyunam, espiritum punwen na kam'.” Then, like always, I recite the English translation lelang taught me when I was who knows how young: “Lord, come to us where we are, bless the food, and fill us with the spirit, Amen.” I never understood why we prayed or knew who we were praying to––I still don’t. When my grandparents shut their eyes and bowed their heads I looked up and around or eyed the food spread out before us. But me speaking Ilocano and knowing the English translation, even if it was just memorized, always did, and still does, make lelang smile. Time to dig in.

The rice comes first, shining and steaming in my bowl, then the chicken malunggay. The ornate silver ladle, stained with decades of soups, stews, and other slow-cooked delights, was never big enough to capture all the digo I wanted to cover my rice with. When the first ladle-full spills over the rice, the steam erupts and surrounds me with the smell of chicken broth, garlic, ginger, and the bitter malunggay. The smell of it gets inside my head and finds its way all through my bones and muscles––I can’t wait to take a bite. Once my rice is appropriately drowning in digo and malunggay leaves, I begin to eat.

Ambrosia.

The rice has been saturated with the salt and warmth of the broth and the flavor spreads across my tongue and down my throat. The chicken falls apart in my mouth and the malunggay leaves are bitter-sweet. It settles in my belly and nothing could be better. This is comfort food. And it’s not just the taste; it’s the smell of the garlic and ginger, it’s the sound of the wind rustling and the rain drizzling outside the window, it’s the cold feeling of the faux leather seat of the chair against my legs, and it’s the gentle yellow of the light glinting off the polished table. Eating chicken malunggay with my grandparents is an experience––a recipe with ingredients for all five senses. I eat too fast, much to lelang’s concern, “napudot!” she tells me. She urges me to “savor” the food; I tell her I want dessert. I want dila-dila.

Lelong rarely says a word but he reads the room and gets up from the table, returning with the tin tray of dila-dila and a recycled plastic butter container with the brown sugar. Having won tonight’s dessert war with lelang, I burst into a fit of giggles when lelong sets the tray on the table. I help myself to two servings, topping each with copious amounts of brown sugar. I take my first glorious bite. The dila-dila is sticky and sweet in my mouth. The mochi clings to the brown sugar and shredded coconut. It all crunches ever so softly, releasing a sugary flavor that tastes like the color of coffee and milk.

My stomach is full, my fingers and mouth are covered in brown sugar, as they should be. I retire to the cool leather couch in the living room and curl up with my head against one of the arms––I know what’s coming: soon the gentle roar of the volleyball game and the blue and green light from the TV will put me to sleep.

I settle into the couch and into a shallow sleep. Soon I’ll feel and hear my parents’ car pulling into the driveway; they’ll open the front door and the chimes that hang on the back will make a melodic glittering sound. Soon my dad will scoop me off the couch and ferry me down the stairs and into the back seat of our silver Honda CRV. I’ll be buckled in and my cheek will come to rest against the seatbelt for the sleepy nighttime car ride home.

Salinas

Voicemail on 202X-XX-XX

Hi, um [unintelligible] so you were in my dream and I wanted to tell you before I forgot. It was weird? So for example I can place most of my memories in time. Like, I remember exactly when I deep cleaned the garage because of what else was going on and who I was in that moment. But I couldn’t tell you when I watched every season of Lost, other than it was in the last three years. I couldn’t even tell you if it was before or after the pandemic started. Um and this dream was weird because it felt like it should’ve been the first kind of thing but it was the second instead.

We were driving. Or I guess we had been driving. It was something that had happened in the past, but I didn’t know when. We had been driving on this like old wooden gold rush bridge over all these fields next to the ocean, and we were in a town where they were selling my baby teeth in stalls on the side of the road, and the signs all said “Welcome to the Artichoke Capital of the World.” Um so I guess the fields were artichoke fields. And I guess, conceivably it could have actually been the artichoke capital of the world. There’s probably not a lot of competition. [Speaker laughs] I remember really liking that they called it that. How you find something you’re good at and hold onto it with everything you’ve got.

And I don’t think I want to be a person anymore. Or like I want to be a place. I want to be the Artichoke Capital of the World.

Um but we were kind of nowhere and you looked me dead in the eyes and said, “Tell me how you’re doing.” And how I normally respond to this is, I tell the truth and say I am doing bad. Not even in an interesting way but in the same way everyone I know is doing bad. I am doing subpar. [Speaker laughs]

Wait, wow, fuck, is “subpar” a golf term? Is “par for the course” like a golf metaphor? Did they trick us into using golf-speak in our everyday conversation?

I don’t [unintelligible] we had, there was a golf course near where I grew up. Even after the drought started. Like the reservoir went dry so they told us to cut down our water usage, and me and my ba filled the bathtub with buckets, and we would water the blueberries growing on the balcony with only the dirty shower water that had collected there. So much pee built up in the toilet because we tried not to flush it. Like legitimately gallons of pee. Um and I never saw anyone on the golf course, but they kept watering it, they kept it this rich woozy shade of green that no real thing has ever been. [Silence]

I think one day I’m going to drive out there with a trowel and a box of matches. Or maybe I will tear the grass up with my bare hands. I will smother it in seeds, coast live oak and madrone and manzanita and sagebrush and sunrose and farewell-to-spring. So much life it chokes you. Let the HOA irrigation system feed its own lustral strangulation until you can see it from town.

And I’m dreaming, so they don’t catch me, or I guess there isn’t a me to catch. Maybe I am dreaming still. Seething carnal sunlight and I want to be I want to be I want to be I want to be I want to be I want to be

Helios is, was, is my friend

Sunlight has the possibility to change everything
Sunlight on my face as I have dew on my ankles
Matching scraped elbows as we zoomed faster than our past toddler selves on the
plastic toddler cars
They never would have known we were old enough to
write about things as deep as oceans
Sunlight on my face as I listen to the birds and wonder if you are ever awake to
see what there is or if you are too entrapped in the aquarium of your mind. I
don’t want a museum ticket pass, touring your mind for my own selfish otherworldly
motives that you don’t try to understand.
But I feel like here drains you and your fishbowl is stopped up.

a scientific wish for you

You gave me a cup of the ocean

And it tasted like sand between my teeth

because my mouth was dry

You can’t get drunk on water

Because you don’t drink that much

But whenever you put a cup of wine to your lips I put

My hand on the couch

cushion between us

there’s too many molecules between us

The electric blue corduroy of your pants radiates heat

Conduction convection

I bake my hand on the couch

Cushion between us

I take a sip of my cup of water

Your water that tastes like sand

Between my teeth

Sits my tongue

Fat, too big

Loose

Loose tongues might reveal so my mouth is shut

Except for my lips

Which are drinking from the cup

Of water from the ocean from the torrential rains from the runoff from the lakes of your hometown Traced all the way back to your lips

This water molecule from your lips to my lips like a k—

Like my hand on the couch

Cushion between us

Softening the joints between our words it’s easy

To talk to you

The intersection from your ideas to mine

Smoothened by the cartilage in

your arms that encircle

Absorbing the sound waves

Absorbing my hand on the couch

Cushion between us

Absorbing the water droplets slipping from the edges of my cup

As I watch you watch her

Requiem

All souls return here. 
But by dark it was just us,
shadowed, haloed in that strange light,
and I wanted nothing more

than to reach out and touch you.
A pink brushstroke, a lily,
a glimmer of lavender—

you’re on your tiptoes, and

I can’t reach, and

there’s one still moment, where

I’ve yet to breathe. Each light
broke against your skin.

A quiet, hollow thing. A kiss. A
clatter of teeth, a puff of smoke,
the highest precipice of that
fourth-floor building,

our eyes. Your hands. That light.

green

It’s warm in here. Inconspicuous enough to go unsuspected. Still warm enough to unsuspectingly piss you off. I was sitting on my knees-- I had to reposition because sweat smothered the backs of my calves.

But I'm sitting by the window, leisurely digesting my food coma, gazing outside with a surprising amount of contentment considering that it’s warm in here. The green smiles back at me

am I paranoid to suspect that I’m the frog in the lukewarm pot?

A dragonfly perches motionless on my windowsill. Nature is serenity’s mockery-- somebody scoff at how the leaves act so unbothered by this heat. Passive. Easy, quiet, beautiful,

Dominatable… We chop trees down then plant little flowers in our planters. They consent and sway to our will until we are swayed into a reluctant unwillingness to survive without them.

The green swirls and sprawls over you, innocuous, its gorgeous Italian vines suffocating your veins and arteries, awakening your sinuses until it pauses right underneath your scalp, numbing you in the permeating lukewarm until suddenly your eyes open and

your flesh sears white under the tip of your upturned nose. Delicate green softens the burning smell. You gracefully submit, contort yourself from an upright position until your fingers grasp for each sweaty Achilles heel.

It’s hot in here. Don’t own yourself, owe yourself-- it would do you good to behave well and say yes as you’re told. You like it. Yes, that was an order-- but it’s okay, green gave it. It feels good to say yes. Yes, that was an order-- but it’s okay, green gave it.

Does he like it? Be serene, just sit still, it’ll be over soon. Appreciate the numbness. It’s okay, he asks if you’re okay so tell him you’re okay-- he pushes your head down so be a good girl.. Yes, that was an order-- but it’s okay, green gave it.

You’ll bruise his feelings if he thinks you didn’t enjoy it so just keep quiet, beautiful. Is the heater on? There’s steam on the windows.

Leave your keys at the counter, look both ways, close the door, press the lock to keep the green out by the doormat. Just make sure to check if the room is empty before you start crying. Mom asks you what you did on your date and the room turns fragrant, reposeful green buoying into the air from underneath the door crack.

“Just went for coffee. It was fun.” A gentle pat on the back as the numbness underneath your scalp throbs

and the leaves rustle outside the window. Mom leaves the room-- green releases its grasp and you gasp for morphine.
foliage, wallflower, pretty and pottable. green: lukewarm, deceptively comfortable

Until suddenly I’m removed from the boiling pot and my legs are served to him, a delicacy on a platter.

Forest

The False Mirror

Clementine Irwin meets Faye in the caboose of a stationary passenger train parked in Station Accompli four minutes after midnight. She greets her the same way she did the first time—firm handshake, first name followed by last—and immediately tells her that she has done a terrible thing.

“I’ve done a terrible thing,” she says.

“‘Terrible’ is relative,” Faye replies.

“Not in this case.”

Clem has already planned what she was going to say. She says that she has done a terrible thing because they may not have seen each other for fifteen years but she still knows Faye well. She requested to meet tonight, in the caboose of a stationary passenger train parked in Station Accompli, because the crime would have already been committed, and there would no longer be anything Faye could do to prevent it from happening.

There is a painting on the wall on the opposite side of the station that Clem stares at the whole time she is reintroducing herself. The painting is of an enormous eye, a blue sky with clouds where the iris should have been. It almost looks like a window, except Clem knows it is four minutes past midnight and therefore the sky is not blue but black.

“So you’ve finally developed a moral compass,” Faye says.

“I guess I have.”

  The train station is closed, the trains locked up for the night. Both Clem and Faye have broken their way in. The night watchman is making his rounds, but Clem knows his schedule well and she knows Faye does too. There are currently five eyes in Station Accompli and they all watch Clementine Irwin with a lazy sort of judgment, the kind that says, “Yes, you may have done something terrible, but who am I to say so?”

 It’s an accurate verdict, more or less. There’s no point in trying to get a painting to understand nuance. All the complexity of the thing she has done has been washed out and to be honest, she doesn’t really care.

  Faye asks if she has anything more to say.

 Clem says not really. At another time, she might have said yes, she might have said I missed you or I loved you or even I’m sorry, but tonight she is too tired and the painted eye is still staring at her from the opposite side of the station, telling her she is morally reprehensible but sort of justified and a wicked person but also probably okay.

  She tells Faye not to read the next day’s newspaper.

“We might have been unlucky.”

  “You said ‘we,’” Faye says. “So you were working with someone.”

 Someone else. So that’s what Faye is worried about. Clem doesn’t have the heart to lie to her.

  “There were a lot of people involved,” she answers quietly, “each doing their own little part. I don’t know all of them.”

  “Which part did you do?”

It would be so easy to tell the truth. The truth is that two people died during an unmemorable performance of a Shakespeare play and Clementine Irwin was an accessory to their murders. She will never get caught and probably no one will even care because nobody really cares about these things until they’re caught in them.

The truth is that Faye will care. Faye is the one person in the world whom Clem cannot bear telling. She also cannot bear keeping secrets from her.

“Just don’t read the news,” she says. “Not even on your phone.”

  “I never read the news.”

  “Oh. Okay.”

“It’s too easy to believe.”

“But I’m not lying to you,” Clem says. “Believe me, Faye. I really did do a terrible thing.”

“‘Terrible’ is relative.”

Clem pinches her sleeve behind her back and twists it around her fingers. She can feel the ghosts there where her skin touches skin, a phantom film of blood in the uncomfortable spaces between her fingers, and she no longer wonders why the lady in the play went mad.

Faye doesn’t hide her hands behind her back, because she has nothing to hide. She tells Clem that this will be the last time they speak, most likely ever, so they’d better both make these last words count. Clem thinks that Faye is probably right.

She will never get caught and probably no one will care. She wasn’t even the murderer. All she did was take a pin from her hair and pass it along. Saying this aloud would likely absolve her of some guilt, although not all, in Faye’s opinion. She stays quiet.

The painted eye withholds comment.

Eventually, Faye gets up, says goodbye, and leaves the same illegal way she came. Clementine Irwin remains in Station Accompli, kept company by three eyes—two in her head and one on the wall. They all point inward.

Otter

Every night an otter came to me, thick billed — in the morning, I was employed — watched children — who were not my own — with my yielding heart, and at night, one bright-eyed otter on its back

watched me — from a distance — in its calm water, its body — a thrumming engine. Morning, 

I rolled dough and cut — off with my teeth — the thick veins — which went down smooth as heat. 

Yes, my night creature, facing the sky, floating — untethered. Gathering slick — oil in its fell. 

Unblinking, while — I saw suns set and — rise and paid no mind. Each quiet visitation, I wanted

it more — when I, bone — tired, heaved and rested and — thought of bygone homes— the beast arrived, repelling — wet as it dived, intense in its motion. What do I want — faith — for. I do not

carry intention, only — the outstretched hand, reaching nightly. The otter — awake — sees me. Does it disturb me — no. Elsewhere, there is always someone departing. 

The Night Groaned

There was a crumbling stone wall at the edge of the old property, and Ellis had decided to climb it. On the other side of the wall, the grass felt springy beneath her sneakers, the air around her cool and comforting. The forest around her barely had the right to call itself a forest. Its few trees were thin and pale, bent from the wind like a violin bow. Fog still hung in the air, and Ellis was reminded that it was still morning. She picked at a scab on her chin.

A beetle scuttled across her path. She stopped short. The beetle settled itself on a dead leaf, stretching itself out contentedly. Ellis stood in the middle of the path, hands clasped behind her back, and watched.

It had chosen a spot of sunlight to lie in—a small focused circle of light that had gotten through the early morning fog. The beetle was shimmering blue and gold in the sunlight, its shell a surprising display of color. It shivered. It shook itself out. It unfolded its glittering wings, one after the other. It seemed to be enjoying itself.

Then it disappeared.

Ellis blinked. She spun in a circle around herself. She sneezed.

Then there it was again—its wings, shimmering against the sun. She picked her way across the path, keeping the glinting wings in her line of sight. The beetle hung in the air, just long enough for Ellis to see it clearly. It was the same one, blue and gold. It wasn’t just the same species; it was the same beetle. Ellis knew.

It took off again, zipping through the forest.

That was all the encouragement she needed. She chased after the beetle, eyes glued to the flashes of blue and gold that flew just out of reach. She tore through shrubs and splashed through puddles. Twigs caught in her hair and spiderwebs clung to her jeans. She was seventeen years old, chasing a bug away from the suburbs of Clark County. It was absurd. It was preposterous. It felt right.

Eventually, though, she did have to stop. She leaned against a tree trunk, hands on her knees, and caught her breath. The beetle hovered in front of her, buzzing. It was blue, then gold, then gone for good.

She sighed and dusted off her T-shirt. She was becoming aware now of the mud on her shoes and the way her socks were soaked. Ellis hated wet socks. She hated them so much that it took her a moment to realize she was in a section of the forest she didn’t recognize.

Because it was a real forest now. She was surrounded by old trees, gray and gnarled and rough to the touch, and growing so close together that she couldn’t stretch out her arms without hitting at least one. And the fog was gone, replaced by a soft sunlight that dappled leaves and gave a soft glow to the tips of her Converse sneakers. There was no path.

Had Ellis been younger, she would have run. She would have run back the way she had come, scared out of her mind to be alone in this blue-gray world, and that fear would have been enough to propel her home. She would have found the path, and the path would have led to the wall, and one short climb later she would have been in her own backyard again, not sure if the new forest had been real or imagined.

But Ellis was seventeen. Rational thought said the path, although she couldn’t see it, was within walking distance. And she had a phone in her pocket, with which she could navigate back home when she chose to return. Forests didn’t go on forever. If she walked in the right direction, rational thought said she would end up where she wanted to go.

So with all these rational thoughts in mind, Ellis decided to explore. After all, she was growing curiouser and curiouser.

#

The sign above the door said “The Sisters” in messy cursive. It was barely legible, graffitied with splotches of paint and weathered from age. Whole chunks of it had been torn out and now hung loose, dangling and twisting soundlessly in the air. As Ellis watched, one piece of the sign snapped off and spun away, hitting the wall of the building to which the sign pointed.

And what a building it was. She approached it cautiously at first, then with more wonder than fear. The building was a hodgepodge of different colors, styles, and shapes. A stone castle turret grew from the northern side, and a red-and-white silo grew from the southern side. One flat roof was painted with multicolored flowers, while another pointed one was draped in newsprint. It seemed like it had been built by a committee that had only the vaguest idea of what an inn looked like, never communicated to each other throughout the process of building, and had given up halfway through. And despite the impossibility of it all, Ellis got the sense that the entire building was growing.

Ellis turned away from the door and looked out at the blue forest, wondering how or why such a thing had been built.

“It’s weirder on the inside.”

She spun back around. The door was wide open now. A warm light was coming from inside, along with music from an instrument she had never heard before. But blocking her view was a young man standing in the doorway, a little older than her and a little taller, with dark hair and a wide smile.

“I’m guessing you need a place to stay?” he said.

“Actually,” she said, “I’m just trying to get home.”

“Classic quest. Well, I’m sure you’ll find something you need here. What’s your name?”

He noticed her hesitation. “Don’t worry, we won’t steal it.”

“Ellis O’Hare.”

“Ellis,” he repeated. “I’m Kai. Come inside.”

He turned around to walk back into the inn. A pair of beetle’s wings grew from his back, shimmering blue and gold. Ellis stared at them for a moment. Then she followed.

#

The inside of the Sisters was just as haphazard as the outside. Ellis and Kai walked into a crowded lobby that seemed to also serve as a dining room. None of the furniture matched, and neither did the people. Some of the Sisters’ patrons had lobster claws instead of hands or vipers instead of hair. There were eye patches and bird tattoos and gold teeth. Sipping from a trough in the corner was a unicorn, midnight-black from horn to hoof.

Taking it all in, Ellis steadied herself against the side of a table, which was covered with a tablecloth made of brown fur. At her touch, the tablecloth stiffened and turned gray. She pressed her palm to the tablecloth. It left a handprint made entirely of stone.

“Kai! There you are!”

A tiny businessman zipped past Ellis, smartly dressed in a three-piece suit. He hovered in front of Kai, held aloft by two pairs of emerald-green dragonfly wings.

“There’s a problem with the ogre in the basement,” he said, out of breath. “He refuses to eat anything we serve him. He says it’s all fairy food—”

Kai turned to Ellis. “Listen, I’ve got to go,” he said. “Find Cat. She’ll explain everything.”

“Who’s Cat?”

“You’ll know her when you see her. Now,” he said, turning to the tiny businessman, “what seems to be the problem?”

Kai walked away with him, leaving stone footprints wherever he stepped. Ellis watched him go, then glanced at the handprint she had left on the table.

She turned in a slow circle, trying to take in everything around her. Three children chased each other between and under the tables, blowing raspberries with their forked green tongues. A white-haired man, hunched over with age, clutched a basket of golden twigs in his gnarled fingers. A woman with a pair of cat’s ears on either side of her head, striped ginger and—

“Cat,” Ellis said to herself, and headed toward her.

The woman was sitting at a corner table, playing a dice game with herself. Ellis watched her shuffle. She didn’t seem to notice Ellis was there.

Ellis cleared her throat and, when that didn’t work, tapped her lightly on the shoulder. A fingerprint-sized pebble tumbled down her back. The woman whipped around and hissed, baring a set of sharp fangs. Her eyes flashed golden, pupils narrowing into slits.

Ellis scrambled backward, knocking over a fruit basket. Star-shaped fruit spilled out onto the floor. She bent down apologetically, gathering as many of the fruits as she could. She reached for one, but another hand grabbed it first.

It was another woman, wearing a red apron. Her eyes were the same color as her short-cropped hair, brown with streaks of gray. Her face was lined from years of well-meaning worry, and green shoots were starting to grow from the rivets on her face. They were everywhere, Ellis realized after looking at her for a few seconds—thin green strands crisscrossing her face, sometimes entirely beneath her skin like veins. They decorated the corners of her mouth and softened her hairline. A single clover peeked out from her left nostril.

This, she knew, was Cat.

“You’re new,” Cat said.

Ellis nodded.

Cat extended her hand, and Ellis took it. Her handshake was solid and firm and smelled like grass.

“Come with me,” she said.

She led her through a red curtain patterned in black. They emerged into a small kitchen—too small, Ellis thought as she looked around, to feed all the people she had seen dining. Cat removed her apron and hung it onto a wooden peg on the wall.

As Ellis watched, a sprout grew where Cat’s fingers had touched the peg. Two tiny leaves unfurled, one after the other.

“You’re rather messy,” Cat said, pointing toward the doorway. A trail of gray stone footprints lay on the floor, matching the places where Ellis had stepped.

“It’s alright,” she continued. “You’re not the first person to arrive here shedding stone. We’ll find some way to make you useful. Every mark a person makes on this building is precious, especially after they’ve gone.”

“After they’ve gone?” Ellis repeated.

“What, did you think we all lived here?” Cat said. “These people are all travelers. Every quest begins in an inn, you know.”

Ellis stared at her blankly.

“An inn,” Cat repeated. “Or a tavern, or pub, or lodge, or whatever you elect to call it on that day. It’s where you stock up on supplies, trade your old boots for a lighter pair, meet a mysterious cloaked stranger who slides a treasure map across the table and weighs it down with a tidy sum of gold.”

“So everyone here is a hero.”

“Not necessarily,” Cat said. “The inn has its fair share of ordinary customers, who aren’t heroic at all—older brothers, for instance, or stepmothers and their daughters. Plenty have stumbled in by accident, like you. And a few are permanent residents, if they have no world of their own, or if their world is gone.”

“Gone,” Ellis repeated, a little dazed.

“Destroyed,” Cat said. “Worlds are fragile things. In my opinion, it’s no coincidence that the worlds most likely to be torn through are also the easiest to leave. It’s the difference between a world made of chiffon and one made of corduroy.”

“What’s my world made of?” Ellis said. “I came here from Clark County.”

“That world isn’t familiar to me.”

“It’s not a world, exactly,” she said. “Not the whole world, anyway. It’s just a county. There are a few of them in the state, and fifty states in the country, and hundreds of—”

“Fifty states, you say?” Cat said.

“Yes. Do you know it?”

A tendril peeked out from Cat’s inner wrist. It wound its way slowly around her thumb, until Cat, with surprising violence, tore it out. She crushed it in her fist and let the pieces fall to the kitchen floor.

“I may have heard of your world after all,” she said. “We’ve had travelers from that world come our way before.”

“What happened to them?” Ellis asked. “Where did they go?”

“Nowhere of consequence,” Cat said quickly. “Two found quests, one found a lover, and all of them found a newer world that was much easier to step into than the one they had left.”

“So none of them went back.”

“Oh, they all tried for a time,” Cat said. “But your world is much tougher to poke through than most.”

Then she gathered her apron, gave Ellis a tight-lipped smile, and left the way she had come.

#

Ellis’s room was made almost entirely of wood, except for the bedsheets. She stepped carefully, afraid of splinters digging into her feet.

“I assume you don’t have anything to unpack,” Kai said from the doorway. “But you can stay here for the time being.”

“I can’t stay here. I have to get home.”

She pulled her phone out of her pocket. She didn’t know if there was cell reception here, but she couldn’t imagine there wasn’t. No matter how strange this place was, it was still less than a day’s walk away from her house.

“That won’t work here,” he said.

She rolled her eyes and tapped the screen. Nothing happened. She pressed the home button, then held down the power button, then whacked the phone against her leg. None of it worked.

Slowly, it began to dawn on her just how lost she was.

“Yeah.” He gestured around the room. “So you’ll be staying here.”

“For how long?”

She turned away from him and ran a hand over the rough surface of the wardrobe, feeling phantom splinters drag themselves across her palm. She picked at her elbow.

“However long you need,” he said simply. “I’m down the hall if you need anything.”

The wooden doorknob turned to stone as he closed the door.

Before flipping off the light switch, Ellis took another moment to wonder how a place like this even had electricity. Maybe that had been one traveler’s mark on the inn, she thought. Maybe they had wired sparks through the walls.

#

Ellis woke up to the sound of shouting from the floor above. She stumbled blearily out of bed and into the hallway, heels hanging out of her sneakers—and walked directly into a waist-high vase in the middle of the carpet.

She looked up. A girl was sitting on the pedestal instead of the vase. Her chin-length hair was such a pale shade of silver that it almost looked white. She was all angles and corners, from her collarbone to her knobbly knees. But what shocked the last bits of sleep from Ellis’s brain were the girl’s ears. They were several times larger than her own, pale blue and pointed like the ears of a fox.

“What are you staring at?” she demanded.

“Why are you six feet off the ground?” Ellis replied.

“Why aren’t you?”

She swung her legs over the side of the pedestal, then leaned over and stretched out her hand. After a moment of hesitation, Ellis shook it.

“Quill,” she introduced herself. “Where are you from?”

Ellis blinked. “Sorry?”

“You’re not from here,” Quill said, “or else I would have seen you before. And I haven’t, which means you must be a traveler. So, what world are you from?”

“Clark County.”

“Sounds boring.” Quill stuck out her foot—her toes were just as angular as the rest of her, and painted purple—and tapped the vase in front of her with her big toe.

“Where are you from?” Ellis asked. “What world, I mean.”

“Nowhere.” Quill grinned, showing a metal fang at the corner of her mouth. “I was born here, in the inn in between. My mother disappeared out the window near midnight, leaving behind five gold coins and a baby in a bassinet.”

“That’s terrible.”

Quill tilted her head to one side. “I don’t think so,” she said. “No parents, no school, no rules—isn’t that what everybody wants? Isn’t that what you wanted, before coming here?”

“Yeah, when I was six,” Ellis said. “But—”

She was interrupted by a second voice, joining the first one in shouting. Quill’s ears swiveled toward the stairwell.

“That’s Noah, on the third floor,” she said. “He and his twin are always fighting, and more often than not they need a whole floor to themselves. No idea what they fight about. It’s annoying as hell, if you ask me.”

She hopped down from the pedestal, brushed past Ellis, and disappeared down the stairwell. She left no stone footprints when she walked, or granite trails where her fingers grazed the wall. It seemed like as far as the inn was concerned, Quill didn’t exist at all.

#

As the days passed by, Ellis watched patrons come and go. Perhaps as a product of witnessing the rotating cast of creatures dining at the inn, she found herself growing acquainted with the small crew who remained day in and day out. There was Quill. There were the twins, Noah and Enya—the shouting ones. The more time Ellis spent around the twins, the more she realized they were sickeningly predictable. Enya always shouted first. Then Noah would meet her. And Robin was always caught in the middle.

Robin was always reading by the fireplace, her long hair falling in front of her face. Ellis joined her one night. She had been feeling lonely, and she thought two lonely people might feel better about themselves if they sat together. She set her dinner plate down onto Robin’s bench, which was rough and lumpy.

“You looked like you could use some company.”

Robin’s head shot up, and flinging her curtain of hair violently out of her face. For an awkward moment they stared at each other in mutually shocked silence.

Robin found Ellis sitting on the fifth stair. She sat down next to her quietly.

“Do you want to talk at all?” Ellis asked.

Robin nodded. “Tell me a story,” she said.

Ellis blinked. “What kind of story?”

Robin shrugged. She picked a fragment of stone out of the fireplace and rolled it between her palms. “Anything.”

So Ellis told her a story about a good friend, a heartbreak, and a spilled milkshake, defining words when Robin asked. Robin nodded solemnly when she was done and asked for another. Ellis was a bit lost. She only really had one story.

So she started fishing around in her pockets until she found the story she was looking for. It was a purple plastic frog. She twisted its head and the frog split in half, revealing a compass inside. The needle wavered unevenly from side to side.

“Is it special?” Robin asked.

“Only to me.” Ellis ran a finger along a familiar path down the compass’s edge. The compass had an interesting story. It had been stolen from a natural history museum gift shop in Milwaukee when Ellis had been fourteen, but she hadn’t stolen it. A friend had stolen it and given it to her, the same friend who had thought maybe they were something more and had ended up knocking his milkshake across the table when Ellis had told him they weren’t. The story was mostly true.

“The needle moves when you tilt it, see,” she said. “Usually the needle always points north, but this one is broken.”

Robin stared at the compass for a long moment, watching the needle swing back and forth. She reached out hesitantly.

“You can hold it,” Ellis said. “It’s not dangerous.”

Before she could offer it to her, Robin snatched the compass from Ellis’s hand and ran.

“Robin’s just weird like that,” Quill said when Ellis took her seat at their usual table. “She and the twins have been here for months now. Kai and I have a bet going on about when they’ll leave. So far I’m winning. Whenever he comes back from a quest, she and the twins are still here.”

“What is his world, anyway?” Ellis asked.

Kai wasn’t present to answer the question. He had a habit of disappearing without warning for weeks on end. It was a side effect of having a quest of his own.

“Stone giants,” Quill said. “They’re a sort of… spirit. Kai’s world is very unstable. It gets destroyed and remade over and over. He has a prophecy—defeat the stone giants, stop the world from ending and all that. That’s why he keeps going back.”

“You know a lot about Kai.”

“We’ve known each other for a long time.”

Ellis stabbed at her dinner with her fork. She still hadn’t gotten used to eating with wood. It felt like leaving splinters in her mouth. And wooden forks just didn’t pierce right. She liked foods you could puncture with a pop. This was more of a blunt force and a squishy struggle.

“You’re bothered,” Quill said. “You’re missing something. I think you want to go home.”

“Of course I do. My family—they must be worried about me.”

“Tell me about them.”

“I lived in Clark County,” Ellis began. “I mean, live. It’s shaped like a doughnut—a ring of houses and stores and things around a forest. Well, not really a forest.”

Quill dipped her ring finger into her water glass and traced a circle onto the table.

“Explain to me,” she said, “how something can be not really a forest.”

“There aren’t any real trees,” Ellis said. “So it doesn’t feel like a forest. It doesn’t even look like it’s trying to be a forest. And I don’t think something that doesn’t look or feel like a forest should be called a forest.”

Quill plucked a berry from Ellis’s plate and crushed it between her fingers. “Sounds sad.”

“It’s not sad. It’s my home.”

“Not really,” Quill said. She placed her juice-stained fingers into her mouth and slowly pulled them out clean.

“Come with me,” she said. “I want to show you something.”

#

In the kitchen, Quill stood on her tiptoes and opened a cabinet door. She pulled herself up onto the counter, reached into the cabinet, and drummed her fingernails on the wood. It sounded like a heartbeat.

With the other hand, she beckoned Ellis closer. Come see, her index finger said.

Ellis saw. Inside the cabinet was a miniature landscape. A tiny cliff overlooked a glassy sea, underneath a night sky sprinkled with stars. The whole thing was perfectly still, like a photograph. She exhaled, and a trail of ripples blew across the sea.

“Come on.” Quill hoisted herself up until she was sitting at the edge of the cabinet. She grinned and let go of the cabinet door, folding her arms.

Then she tipped backward and disappeared.

“Quill!”

Ellis stuck her head inside the cabinet. She could see Quill below her, tiny and very far away, standing and waving for her to jump in too.

In another time or another world, she would have run away. But this time, she didn’t. She took a deep breath and dove headfirst into the cabinet.

Inside the cabinet, the sky was dark and the air was cool. A thin blade of yellow light pointed toward the sky, where the door was hovering with seemingly nothing attached to it.

Quill was standing at the edge of the cliff, looking out toward the sea. Ellis joined her. It scared her a little, how silent the sea was. With no wind to make waves, it might as well have been a sheet of black ice. The air felt still too, unnaturally so. She felt like she had walked into a place suspended in time, untouchable.

“What is it?” she whispered, and she wasn’t sure if she was speaking to Quill or to herself or to the quiet world around her.

“It’s a pocket world,” Quill explained. “I found it some years ago while looking for a snack. I don’t know which visitor made it, or if a visitor made it at all.”

She closed her eyes and exhaled. A phantom breeze rippled across the sea again, disappearing into darkness as it dwindled away.

“Cat calls it an ocean,” she said. “But it’s not really an ocean. There’s no moon here, so there are no waves. And you can’t have an ocean without waves.”

She opened her eyes and grabbed Ellis’s hands. “Is this what your forest feels like?”

Ellis looked out into the black sea. She had no reflection.

“Not at all,” she said. “This is beautiful.”

Quill blinked away tears. “It’s not beautiful to me,” she said. “It just keeps going on forever, all the same. I’ve always wanted to find the end of it. And I think—I think I’m supposed to. I think that’s my quest.”

“Then get a boat,” Ellis said. “Go on your quest.”

“I’m afraid to,” Quill said. “It’s easier to wonder. That way, I can imagine. But I will go one day. I’ll stand on my tiptoes on the prow, and it’ll tip forward and we’ll go into the water together. I have a theory, you know.”

She took a deep, shuddering breath.

“I don’t think I’d be able to sail,” she went on. “This world wouldn’t want me to do that. We’d break in half on the water instead, the boat and me, and half of me would go spinning across the sea and the other half would stay put, and Cat would find us and she’d cry and cover us in flowers and that would be the end of it.”

She took a step toward the edge of the cliff, then another. Ellis wanted to reach out and drag her back to safety, but she couldn’t. She felt rooted to the ground.

Quill looked back at Ellis and there was something so perfect about her, perfectly still, and then she stepped off.

And then they vanished, and they were back outside the cabinet, and Ellis had to reach out and grab Quill’s wrist to be sure they were both still breathing.

#

Ellis was exploring the basement when Cat walked in. She was inspecting the labels on a row of dusty wine bottles. Fifth Floor, Third Sink read the first one. Fifth Floor, Seventh Sink read the next, and that was how she learned that the faucets in The Sisters dripped wine instead of water.

Cat flicked a finger across a bottle. Its ring sounded hollow.

“I saw you with Robin,” she said. “Don’t talk to her anymore.”

A shower of gravel descended from the ceiling and onto Cat’s head.

“Why not?” Ellis asked.

“She ate her own world,” Cat said. “The world that Robin and the twins came from was very fragile, and she was so hungry to get out that she pulled her entire world apart and swallowed it whole. The twins barely got her to The Sisters before their world collapsed entirely.”

“But why would that make her dangerous?” Ellis asked. She worked a finger underneath the label on one bottle and started peeling it off.

Instead of responding, Cat reached into her mouth and slowly began to tug at something instead. Ellis just kept peeling. They were mirror images, she and Cat, and both knew the other was stalling. All that was left was to see whether the sprout or the sticker would pop off first, and who would be forced to talk.

With a final, disappointed tug, a pea sprout popped free from between Cat’s teeth. She put it back in her mouth, chewed, and swallowed. Ellis ripped off the rest of the sticker and waited.

“She’s a parasite,” Cat said finally. “Robin will destroy any world she finds. So she has to stay here, and the twins do too.”

“Have you considered that she just wants a home?”

Cat ran her fingers through her hair, letting loose a shower of seeds. “There is no better home available to her than here.”

“Clark County.”

The seeds rattled to the floor.

“But why not?” Ellis said. “She asked me to tell her stories. She wants to go there more than anything else. You said my world is tough. Maybe it’s tough enough that she won’t break it. And I—I could go back with her.”

“Your world is tough. You’re right about that,” Cat said. “But no one who’s seen that world ever wants to return.”

         “I want to return,” Ellis said.

          “You don’t,” Cat said. “You were eager to leave. You followed Kai into the forest without question.”

“Only because I thought I could come back!”

“So did I,” Cat said, and Ellis fell silent.

“Tell me a story, then,” she said. “Tell me about your quest.”

          Cat tried to explain it as clearly as she could remember. There had been a green girl with ferns in her hair that went down to her feet. She had left flowers where she had walked and had blown dandelions when she laughed.

They had passed a rose between their lips when they had kissed, and that had been Cat’s first mistake. Her second mistake had been to let the rose grow, to let it sit lodged in her throat until it was too late. It had almost killed her to pull it, and she hadn’t even been able to get all of it out. The rose had taken root in her skin, and now no matter how much of it she plucked out, it would never go away.

         She had never understood the rules of this world, but she was convinced that the rules were built on the fact that the universe simply didn’t care what a person deserved. When daisies had started sprouting from her sister’s skin, Cat had thought she was spreading a disease. But hundreds of people had come in and out of the inn since then, and none had left growing flowers. The whole thing felt malicious.

Cat hadn’t been there when her sister had died. She often imagined how things would have gone if she had been able to kneel beside Ruby’s bed and say goodbye.

Ellis left for the garden when Cat finished, tasting roses on her tongue.

#

Ellis found Ruby in the garden. Her eyes traced the arc of an arm, a wrist, five fingers with ivy for nails. She was a living statue. Her cheeks were green and mossy, thin vines spilled down her back instead of hair, and two white daisies grew where her eyes should have been. But even despite the greenery that covered her face—or maybe because of it—the girl’s face was unmistakably a younger version of Cat’s.

“Ruby, meet Ellis. Ellis, meet Ruby.”

Quill emerged from the other side of the green girl, holding a pair of scissors. She snipped away a stray leaf from the girl’s shoulder.

“Cat told me she was dead,” Ellis said, circling the statue.

“Not exactly true,” Quill said. “I mean, as far as we know she’s still alive in the way a plant is alive. She’ll live as long as we give her water and sun and a weekly trim, but it’s not like she can walk around or eat dinner or talk to us, you know?”

“I didn’t know any of this,” Ellis said. “I didn’t know Cat was turning into a plant. I thought it was just a part of her, like your ears or Kai’s wings.”

“It is a part of her, though,” Quill said. “In a manner of speaking. Her plants are like your skeleton. One day, it’s all you’ll have left.”

“But why did it happen?”

         “I don’t know,” Quill said. “And if Cat does, she’s never told me. I used to ask her all the time, until I got old enough to realize that wasn’t polite. But Kai thinks it’s because she stayed too long in the wrong world. If you don’t have a quest, this world sticks to you like glue.”

Ellis absentmindedly pulled a jagged fragment of stone from her wrist. It stung a little this time.

“People know,” Quill continued. “Although they don’t say it. That’s why travelers don’t stay.”

She grabbed Ellis’s wrist and turned it over. A thin line of blood welled up. As they watched, a new layer of stone bubbled up from the crack in her skin.

“You’re starting to turn too,” Quill said. “You should be getting on soon. We don’t want you to turn out like Robin.”

Suddenly Ellis felt very cold.

“The people here don’t quest because they’re heroes,” she said to herself. “They quest because they have to. Because if they stay too long in another world, they become… Quill, I have to go home.”

“What?”

“I can’t spend the rest of my life hopping between worlds,” she said. “I’m not a hero. I like staying indoors and taking warm clothes out of the dryer. I can’t stay here.”

She tried to step away. Quill blocked her.

          “You can’t go home,” she said. “You’re the only traveler who’s ever given me a second thought and I’m not going to let you just go.”

“I’m not going to stay here until I turn into something I’m not,” she said. “You’ll make new friends.”

Quill wiped her eyes angrily. “You really don’t get it, do you?” she said. “You. Can’t. Go. You need currency. Kai led you here, but you’d need something else to lead you back.”

Currency. Ellis thought of the stories, tales of heroes who had to exchange something for a wish. She realized what currency she had. And she knew who she had given it to.

#

Robin didn’t have much time. The twins would soon notice she was gone, and they would go to Cat, and Cat would know where she had gone. The pocket world was cold and uninviting and she hated it, but she needed it to get to Clark County. She put the compass between her teeth and dug both hands into the sky, pulling out midnight-dark clumps with the consistency of cake.

“Robin!”

Ellis had tumbled head over heels into the pocket world, Quill chasing after her. Robin would have to work faster. She reached into the sky, burying her arm up to the shoulder in it.

The night groaned. It creaked. It sighed.

And then, with an ear-splitting scream, the night split down the middle. Robin tore at the crack, pulling out chunks and tossing them aside. She threw herself at the sky one last time, and finally the hole was large enough to see what lay beyond it. It was a forest—well, not really.

Behind her, Ellis stopped short. Neither she nor Robin moved, both shocked into silence at the appearance of Clark County.

And then Kai was standing next to them, Kai with his wings brushing against her face and Quill didn’t know how he had known to be there, but she was glad nonetheless. He was her friend, she realized. She liked him and maybe he liked her back, like Ellis did. Or used to. She didn’t know what Ellis thought of her now.

Meanwhile, Ellis was running, faster than she ever thought she could. But before she could reach the edge of the cliff, Robin pushed her away. She spat out the compass, and it rolled away. The tear shivered.

They fought, both desperate to reach the tear in the sky first. Robin kicked her in the side, knocking her to the ground. She reached for Clark County with one sky-coated hand, and jumped.

Then something pulled her back.

Robin tumbled to the ground. Her head snapped back, hitting stone with an awful crack. As she fell, Cat fell too, holding the back of Robin’s sweater in her clenched fist.

Ellis grasped the edge of the tear. It felt slick and slippery, like the inside of someone’s cheek. She tightened her grip on the sky and fixed her gaze toward Clark County in the not-so-far distance.

“Ellis.”

She turned around. Cat was kneeling beside Robin. As her chest rose and fell, her eyes darted from Cat to Clark County and back again. Her hand still reached for the sky.

A bud erupted from Cat’s cheek, blooming into a sunflower as big as her hand. Cat tore it away and crushed it in her fist, leaving behind a broken stem and a thin trickle of blood.

“Go,” she said. “You’ve found a way out. We won’t steal it.”

So Ellis walked through the tear, and toward home.

#

Lying at the edge of the cliff, Robin coughed and sputtered. She spasmed once, then twice, then stood. Saliva dribbled down her chin. She blinked slowly, three times in a row.

Kai stared. Was it his imagination, or was Robin bigger now? She was growing as she pulled herself fully upright, skin rupturing as it stretched. Soon she was seven, eight, nine feet tall. She reached up and tugged at another clump of sky. It dissolved in her fingers.

That was when he noticed that her fingers were starting to go gray.

Robin pulled down another fistful of sky and hurled it at Kai, catching him in the shoulder. He crumpled to the ground, his entire arm in agony. Quill dove to his side, catching his head just before it hit the ground.

“Help me up,” he said to Quill.

“I won’t,” she said fiercely. “This isn’t your quest, and you’re my only friend.”

Weakly, he extended his arm, pressing his palm flat to the ground. A rivulet of stone shot out from his fingertips, past the edge of the cliff and above the ocean until it disappeared into the distance.

Quill rushed to the edge of the cliff. She stared out to sea, eyes shining in a way that Kai knew so intimately, the way his eyes looked whenever he faced his own quest. It was the look of a person who had finally found what she was looking for.

She glanced back at him.

Remember me.

Then she ran across the stone pathway, inches above the surface of the sea. Kai watched her go until she vanished into the darkness. She hadn’t needed a boat after all.

Meanwhile, Robin continued to grow. With tremendous effort, Kai pulled himself to his feet. He rose into the air, his wings beating unsteadily. He reached into his pocket and pulled out a slingshot.

It was a move he had practiced dozens of times. All preparing, he realized now, for this very moment. He could do it in his sleep. He could do it with a broken shoulder.

But his pockets were empty now. Robin grabbed another handful of sky and took aim, and that gave him an idea. He bent down and found what he was looking for—a purple plastic frog.

His hands loaded the slingshot without him having to tell them to. He took aim. Closed one eye, then the other. Opened them both. And let go.

The compass lodged in Robin’s throat. She choked, swayed on the spot, then collapsed.

Cat ran to her side and pressed her hand to Robin’s forehead. Where her fingers touched, tiny fissures spread across the stone. Daisies sprouted from between the cracks.

Robin’s eyelids fluttered. “Cat?” she mumbled.

Cat shushed her. “Don’t talk.”

She placed her hand over Robin’s mouth. A dozen tiny dandelions bloomed around her lips.

“I just wanted to go home,” Robin said. “Get—get Noah and Enya.”

You don’t need them, Cat thought.

          Robin blinked. “Please.”

Cat grabbed her face. Wherever she touched, flowers bloomed across Robin’s face—faster than they ever should have, out of control. Vines erupted from Robin’s mouth and between the cracks in her skin. Ruby-red flowers blossomed along each vine, and the fragrance made Cat’s eyes water.

Finally, she reached into Robin’s mouth up to the elbow, gouging out her insides with her nails, reaching desperately for the compass, for more flowers, more rubies, more life. Until Robin was nothing but a small bundle under a hill of flowers, and until that bundle stopped breathing and it was all over and everything was quiet.

#

Ellis ran. She ran through the blue forest, so familiar and yet so foreign, all the dusty and dirty things she had grown used to tearing at her clothes and her skin, and she remembered why she hated them. She kept running.

As she ran, she began to feel a curious sensation. It started at the tips of her fingers and crawled up her forearms, and when she looked down at her sleeves she saw that they were turning gray. She remembered what Quill had said about turning into stone.

She threw herself over the wall, climbing up and up and up, and she thought she must be miles above the tree line even though there were no more trees.

She scrambled up the wall, her nails sliding across stone, and she felt herself getting stuck. Stone was racing up her legs now, sprouting from her scabs and knitting itself against the wall. She gave a kick, and the stone shattered. She kept climbing, and when she reached the top she almost fell over the other side.

Clark County was made entirely of stone.

Ellis walked down the main street, right through the middle. She didn’t have to worry about cars. They were all stone too, some parked at the curb and others frozen at intersections. The traffic lights were gray now; she couldn’t tell if they were red or green.

There was little she recognized about Clark County. There was her bus stop, her high school, the diner where her milkshake had spilled. She could name each building, even dredge up a few memories related to each. But she didn’t know these places. Not anymore.

She stopped in front of her house, then realized it was the one next door. Without their usual pastel colors, all the houses on her street looked the same. She stood for a long time on her front doorstep.

Slowly and carefully, she reached for the doorknob. It came off in her hand, letting loose a puff of fine dust. The door cracked down the middle. Each half crashed to the ground.

Behind the door was color—a pulsing light, something that was at once both pure white and hundreds of millions of flickering hues coming together. Ellis’s heartbeat matched it, throbbing in her chest. And her quest—her quest, bought with her own breath and mortgaged with her lungs—lay within the light.

She stepped inside.

Reverie

Sometimes Happiness Is Rebellion

Letter to Cicada

Cicada on the sidewalk,

I’m not mad at you. I’ve had seventeen years to make this deduction; in that time I’ve moved so far from the Virginia house that I scarcely remember the color of the carpet anymore. Just the pattern remains; decidedly a tread-worn Persian, with some ornate border like crown molding. You may not remember what you could possibly have done to anger me. After all, I was so young—but I guess relative to you even a toddler would look monstrous. No offense. This is what I want to say before the other things: I don’t have the privilege of hibernation, of selecting a window of time in which to be out, to be vulnerable, to let the world pick at me. Only to retreat to my hole when the going gets tough. I have to be here, inside me, outside, all the time. Do you know what that’s like?

Tonight the rain is freezing—not frozen and not exactly liquid—it’s in a transitory state, outside our classifications. It’s freezing on the windows of my dorm room, freezing into the cracks in the sill, stealing in. If you were here, you wouldn’t be; you’d be deep underground, crust around your mandibles, drool on your plated chin. I walk below a small tree planted under a lamppost. The yellow light is fractal, divided but restored, made more whole by the branches that split it. I watch, silent, from underneath. Then I keep walking. 

I know what you’ll say, and yes, I have found room in my life for romance. Actually, you’ve missed a lot. The best was a pomegranate bush, fully fruiting, on a mountainside in Palos Verdes. From that slope I could see the ocean and the desert all at once. Islands dotted the sea like portals to a less salty dimension. Joshua trees reached for God. I stared with purpose into the glare, and you’ll be happy to hear I thought of you. You were probably sleeping. 

What I’m getting at was that time, seventeen years ago, when I picked you up off the sidewalk outside the house in Virginia. I think about it now with fear for my past self. What treacherous pathways did you reveal by presenting me, an unknowing child, with a vital choice? How dangerous could it really be, the act of radical trust?

I’m re-telling our story to re-remember, and sending it to you to remind you that your actions don’t end when you do them. That at any given moment, you’re doing everything you’ve ever done all over again, to every person to which you’ve ever done anything, all at once. Maybe I’m making sense; maybe I’m not. You’ve had years and years, though, to figure me out.

But we were our own little secret. Do you remember the deal we made? Respect to my mother’s sensitive ears; no chirping inside or after 9 p.m. In exchange I agreed to let you out of the cardboard box. You flew in perfect triangles around my room until you collapsed. Then we would talk and talk. You know this. 

That night I said hey, cicada. You said what. I said, why does it feel like you chose me? You said I don’t know. 

The conversation went on.

You could see something budding in me—it was a simple sadness, but a big one, and unusual for a three-year-old. I’d known it was coming, in fact it had already begun spilling out of me, sadness like a blue mold; pathogenic, beautiful. Dark blue, pen-ink sadness on my lumpy fingers, smudging white kitchen tiles, leaving sickly shadows in the bathtub. It brought me friends on the playground, but the wrong ones. Troubled children who scratched at their bodies as if trying to shed. Above all it was unsettling; what had I, at such a young age, already found in this world to be sad about? Hell if I knew, but I had been good to you. You wanted to help. You had a solution for me, your poor, sad, fallible human best friend.

The hole in the Persian carpet had been there for ages, but that night you made it change colors; it shone purple and silver, swirling metallic and glowing up at me. I remember you let out a chirp, not like your tree-borne screams, this one deeper, more percussive. It was loud; it was past 9 p.m. The hole opened wider, the circumference of my waist now, and swirling, beckoning me. I knew you wanted me to go with you, I knew the hole led somewhere underground, to your dreamy haven of utter absence. I knew not just every person got this opportunity. Fear kicked, high in my chest. I could leave this world, my unfounded, aching sadness, for your hollow nook, devoid of feeling. Seventeen years.

I looked at you and I couldn’t figure out what color your eyes were. I hopped over the hole, left you in my room. I’m sorry, but what could I have done? I remembered there were things I in fact liked to feel; a wet sandbox, an unusually smooth portion of my bottom lip. This part you don’t know: I tiptoed down the hallway, crawled into my mother’s bed. 

The next morning I met the husk of you; you had scribbled an address on a Post-It next to your burnt-up skeleton, in case I changed my mind. Today is seventeen years since then. Somewhere south of here, you’re out in all your glory, screaming at the gods. I’m happy for you. Today I woke up and went on a hike. I picked a pomegranate from the bush and scooped out the seeds and nibbled on them. I finished a novel. Went on a date, even. Went to work, of course. My sisters and I watched a TV show until late at night, then I went to bed and fell asleep. I remember, in the morning after you left, I slid off my mother’s bed into a square of sunlight. I tugged her hand and insisted, “I’m awake, I’m awake!”

So—no; I’m not angry, you showed me earnestness before any one human ever did. I hope you can find in my declination of your offer a well wish. I want all my life split into several reams of seventeen years; I want to eat and sleep and wake and wait to hear you scream.

Your friend.