birds can be everywhere at once northern
harrier all winter long guarding the plot of dormant
strawberries and asparagus when, actually, some habits are unaccountable.
like enjoying interferences, the iridescence caused by this. and you
winter bird beside the woodstove caused the jar to crash
and crackle into bits of undoved. arrival.

something nasturtium of our whereabouts. every hellebore
bloomed and crabapple. blossoms out-pinked with never asking—
why the hops wasn’t brewed, or the kiwi coaxed
to supply what quinces couldn’t satisfy. an empty chicken
coop and untilled field where st. john’s wort grew
but was not steeped. remember how
that lime-green nook incensed our nest.
a careful task of ten acres to northern

harrier who stalked all winter long. she should
have gone south, instead waited for your birth
against the radiant floor. by photograph
that captured the unjustified shadow
hovering above the pregnancy
plant who bloomed a thousand times. to begin
with broken glass and shaking.

our anxiety to rustle certainty—
you, proper hawk of uneven
grass and one-eyed horses.

y madrone currently lives and works in Chicago, IL via Olympia, WA via Detroit, MI via Baku, Ahzerbaijan. Other work can be found or is forthcoming in The National Poetry Review, RHINO, American Letters & Commentary, Columbia Poetry Review, Cloudbank & So to Speak.

Andrew Bynom

On the morning of the cease-fire we set off to meet the Turkish delegation in the poppy field above the beach. We mounted a plateau and advanced through gullies filled with thyme. I always liked the smell of thyme. Ahead of us, a voice attached the word Anne, Turkish for mother, to the morning air. “Anne,” he said, as if the mother in question had just entered a room where she had every right to be. I asked Ricky Rumbold why it took wounded men so long to die. He said men would will their own deaths but their bodies rebelled, refusing to lie still, reluctant to decompose.

I didn’t think we would get any rain today. In fact, I knew we wouldn’t. Today there would be nothing but death bathed in soft sunlight. The overnight showers had cleared the biscuit-colored dust that hung over the peninsula. When word of the cease-fire spread through the niches and dug-outs the ANZACs had hewn into the Gallipoli rock, few wanted to emerge into the light; none trusted the intensity of the new silence. For a month these men had been looked down upon, sniped at from poppy-covered peaks. Now they moved slowly towards the beach like the first bathers of summer, shredding tatty remnants of uniform as they went.

I bent down to pick up one of the purple flowers and held it to my nose. I knew we were close. I could smell it on the droplets forming on tulips and bluebells, on the flame-colored fruit of a pomegranate tree. The men excreted it through their pores. It was a sticky smell like charred syrup.

We moved into a larger area of scrubland and saw the Allied trench line facing an open area of two or three hundred yards. Two days had passed since the Turks tried to drive the ANZACs from the cliff face into the sea. Forty thousand men sneaked across two gullies in full view of howitzer and machine gun. Gluttony broke out in the Australian and New Zealand ranks. They fired indiscriminately before becoming ruthless, waiting for the officers to appear and assemble their men before slaughtering them wholesale in neat, packaged platoons.

Men lay in mounds on the wet earth. Some had sunk to their knees, leaning and clinging to their brethren, freeze-framed in a drunken proposal. Ricky Rumbold and I clambered over and around them, tripping and stumbling, and laughing as one of us almost fell, only to be swooped up by the other.

—-

I had met Ricky Rumbold the day before when he was perched on the blubbery crest of an abdomen belonging to a sergeant of the Turkish 57^th. “This one will be all right for a day or two, mate, but then you have to watch out or they can explode.” Ricky Rumbold was my very own ANZAC guide. I introduced myself.  He couldn’t believe my name. “Aubrey?  That was the name of me sister’s cat!” He shook my hand. “You here to parley with the enemy, mate?” Yes I was. “You watch them Turks don’t give you any of that goat’s cheese, you’ll be shitting through the eye of a needle for a week.” Thanks. “You should get some of their baccy, mate. It’s better than the shite they give us here.” Yes, I would try. So why hadn’t this man been buried?  “Can’t do anything, mate, till Birdy gets here and you’ve finished pow-wowing with the Turks.” Birdy?  “Jesus Creepers, mate. General Birdwood.” Oh that Birdy. “Yeah that Birdy.  He’s all right for a pomme. His dick’s a bit shriveled up – we all had a gander when he came swimming with us. But he’s got a lotta balls.”

Ricky was running a book on the nearly dead. For cigarette stakes he gave odds on how long a fallen soldier could stay in voice – two fags could win you twenty if a recognizable ‘mother’ or a specific girlfriend lasted the day. One man growled Fatma as if berating a troublesome wife, another called Allah, Allah, Allah, with the staccato rhythm of a steam train. I taught Ricky the meaning of a high-pitched yardim, help, which was attracting some late interest. He offered me a free wager, “what with you providing inside information as it were,” but I politely declined.

—-

In the poppy field the Turkish delegation was standing in a half circle, smoking and biting into pistachio shells. The senior ranking officer, who wore more gold lace than his colleagues, introduced himself as Essad Pasha and saluted. The second officer called himself Arif, had acne and picked at his ear between sentences. The third, a captain, kept back from the huddle we had formed amid the scarlet flowers, drinking tea from the tulip-shaped glasses the Turks had secreted in their packs. We chatted about the weather, the King and the Sultan in that order. But this captain seemed content to gaze off into the distance so it was a surprise when he said during a lull in our small talk, “They have to be buried today. They can’t stay there. Our religion won’t allow it.” His voice was as soft and tired as a bruised peach.

He took one step towards our group, parceling his gaze among us. He was taller than his colleagues; lean, sharp-shouldered under worn beige. His green eyes and smooth features looked incongruous among his swarthier Anatolian colleagues.

The captain turned and pointed to the gullies below. I followed his outstretched arm over the scarlet smear of the poppy field, past blasted tree stumps and charred scrub, down to where his soldiers lay on beds of thyme. The captain held all this in his splayed fingers like a green-eyed sorcerer conjuring faces from the earth. I asked him where we would bury the dead. “Where they fell. We will dig mass graves. And if necessary, we will carry them, body by body, until we find a place to dig.”

“I’m not sure the cease fire will last that long,” I said.

The captain smiled. “Then, why are you here?”

—-

We were to meet the generals so they could listen to our plans and claim them as their own. We would have to go back through the gullies to reach the path to the cliff-top. The Turks agreed to blindfolds at the cliff-top. It wouldn’t do for them to see the trenches on the ANZAC bridgehead. We would remove the blindfolds only when we were safely down the other side of the cliff and inside the officer’s mess on the beach at ANZAC Cove.

The Turks gave us cologne-scented handkerchiefs to hold over our mouths and noses. The captain led the way, stooping to pick up the odd personal effect: a small Koran, a hunting knife, a strip of brightly-colored turban, a pocket-watch proudly ticking, before placing it next to the nearest body. Meticulous, he was slowing down the war to see what it was all about. I shuffled along in his wake, a child trailing through a museum of bloated relics.

Ricky Rumbold walked a step behind me. The quiet was overwhelming. Instead of the guns and the flares and the screams of men and animals, we heard the insidious lapping of the sea, the intimidation in the breeze, the faint threat of returning bees.

The captain bent over another man and extracted a letter protruding from a torn pocket. The corners of the letter were neatly bloodied as if the writer had dipped them in sealing wax. I waited for him to replace it but instead he folded the paper, turning the stained corners inwards and slipped it into his own pocket. For a moment his green eyes settled on me and I heard his question again, “Then, why are you here?” I could have told him I was here to crawl out to the foremost trenches during the battle and translate the statements prepared by the mandarins at the Foreign Office, entreaties to win over the wily Turk. Or to weave tales of German treachery and dastardly deeds, claiming to be a friend of the Sultan, urging my enemy to join us in holy war against the Kaiser. I was here to stand guard with my dictionaries and grammar books while decorated generals came into my tent and examined my arsenal of words.

At the cliff-top we stopped to blindfold the Turkish officers, Ricky Rumbold placing Arif’s spectacles, absurdly, on the outside of his blindfold. Then we heard a voice coming up from the earth. A man was singing in Turkish, a scratchy tenor recalling streams and swings, the glimpse of a loved one in a summer meadow. I realized as I listened that I had heard this refrain before. The captain’s ears pricked like a dog’s and I saw him mouth the lines:

I used to think there was no friend for me in this world

But as I offer myself up for you, I know I’ll never be alone

The captain smiled. It was the saddest smile I had ever seen, heightened not diminished by the cloth over his eyes. A smile of quiet times, a simple reflection of one man’s love for another. A smile that didn’t belong here, I thought ungraciously. The song too with its uncontaminated pleasures didn’t belong to a voice that chafed at the melody like army wool on a rash.

The singing stopped. “Strewth, that bloody singing corpse,” Ricky Rumbold said in my ear. “He’s a tough one, I’ll give him that. I had twenty fags riding on ‘im being done.”

We began our descent, treading tiny steps down the goat tracks as a line of ANZACs bearing kerosene tins of water struggled in the opposite direction. They had hewn themselves into the rock here, a sheet of iron or a layer of earth for a roof, an extra shelf chiseled into the rock to hold their rations, a piece of blanket for a curtain, a coffee-tin to house a pink oleander or tulip. Now, sunbathing on the cliff, they watched us struggling down. For men who herded cattle for a living across vast spaces where the sky nuzzled the earth we had become the morning’s entertainment. Blind man’s bluff in a freakish circus with no safety net.

When we reached the beach, Ricky Rumbold smiled broadly and winked at me. “Hey!  Whoa!  Hold up there! Two steps to the left, unless you wanna lose your feet!” The Turkish officers obliged as Ricky plotted a course through imaginary mines and barbed wire. The captain shuffled, sidestepped, and sighed.

We ushered the Turkish officers into the mess tent and removed their blindfolds. I recognized Birdwood from his photograph in the newspapers. “A word,” he said, and held open the tent flap to let me back outside. He was slighter than I expected, watery blue eyes in a pockmarked face. “Do you have everything you need?” he asked me.

“Yes, thank you, sir. But perhaps you have access to a more recent map of the terrain?”

“If we had ‘access’ to a ‘recent’ map of the peninsula, we wouldn’t have landed here in the first place, lieutenant-colonel.”

“No. I suppose not, sir.”

“Still, I am sure we can rustle you up one of our most ‘recent’ maps, from about 1865. How does that sound?”

“I’m not sure sir.  Does it bear any resemblance to what’s here now?”

“My dear boy, you would be better off with a map of Piccadilly Circus.”

“Oh.”

The general smiled. “You have been chatting to the Turkish officers. What do they say about the attack?”

“They’re all a bit stunned, sir. Understandable, really.”

“Well, lieutenant-colonel, we were all a bit ‘stunned’ to find ourselves attacked by forty thousand Turks.”

I was still working on a rejoinder to this when Birdwood turned on his heels and went back inside the mess tent.

The negotiations went well. We sat in the officer’s mess on soft armchairs, while servants hovered with trays. We smoked cigars. The Turkish officers produced cheese, olives and cucumbers. The cucumbers, especially, were well received. We ate and smoked. A bottle of Napoleon brandy was passed around. General Birdwood led the negotiations for our side, after shaking hands solemnly with Essad Pasha. General Bridges should have been there also, but he had managed to get himself shot on Friday morning. General Birdwood removed his cap to reveal slicked back iron-grey hair. The captain watched the proceedings keenly, his green eyes darting around the room, but almost inevitably settling on me. Disconcerted, I struggled to translate, once or twice asking Essad Pasha to repeat himself. We agreed that the cease-fire should last until six that evening. Three zones were to be marked out with white flags for the burial of the dead. One (by far the largest) was for the Turks, one for the Allies, and the third was for those only God could identify. Priests and imams were to wear white armbands as they worked. Everybody was to dig. Nobody was to shoot.

We stood to attention and saluted. We shook hands and wished each other well. It had all been very civilized. I felt like I was leaving my club in the Strand, waiting for the footman to fetch my hat and coat. Suddenly, an Australian soldier burst into the mess tent, wild-eyed. “Which one of you bastards has my kettle?” he demanded. We stared. Ricky Rumbold guffawed outside. I didn’t look at General Birdwood.

I came alive as we buried the dead. I flitted between both camps, conveying requests, allaying suspicions and soothing egos.  I supervised the digging of the communal grave. I directed the stretcher bearers. I carefully marked out the white flags. I was respectful to the officers and affable to the men. I decided when everybody could rest and when they could eat. I checked that the troops who were not needed remained below their parapets. I supervised the gathering of rifles into a huge pile and appointed the roughest looking soldiers I could find to guard it. I peered into dead soldiers’ faces and gave them a nationality. I introduced priests to imams and translated the Koran and the Bible for each when we could not tell where a man was from. I was magnificent. I was God for the day in a land God had forgotten.

My only regret was that I could not find the captain. I wanted him to see me in action, to stand and watch me in that remote way of his, observing how soldiers scurried to my command. He would understand then why I was here and that this was not the time for pieces of cloth or still-ticking watches.

At 5:15 we could see stretches of thyme. At 5:30 we discovered the Turkish watches were eight minutes fast. Frenzied activity. They would have blown us away like flies for being unpunctual. Then I saw the captain staring at the earth and I went over to him, holding out my watch, hoping he hadn’t heard about the time difference. There were fifteen minutes before the cease-fire ended. The captain was bent over a body. I thought nothing of it at first. After all, he tended to so many on our walk to the cliff. But when I approached and heard the pale voice, the fragment of lyric, I knew he had found the boy who defied Ricky’s odds.

But as I offer myself up for you, I know I’ll never be alone

—-

He was a young officer, too young for the stripe on his shredded uniform. The captain was hunched over him like a doctor or priest. I bent down beside them. I watched the captain administer to the boy, folding his arms over his chest and passing the two remaining buttons of his tunic through their holes. He smoothed the boy’s brow with the backs of his fingers. The boy’s mouth formed silent shapes and the captain prayed the poetry of the Koran. I looked at my watch. Five minutes. “We have to get back behind the lines,” I said, and put my hand on the captain’s shoulder and felt the bone. I waited for his weary acquiescence but it was as though I wasn’t there.

The captain placed the Koran, a cube of black leather, in the boy’s right hand. He got to his feet, straightened his tunic and adjusted his cap. But when he leaned into that familiar, unhurried stride, it was not towards the Turkish lines but over to where his shovel lay.

Three minutes. I imagined the men calling me back behind the lines, the arms waving above the parapets, the anxious whistles. The captain walked back towards the body, shovel slung over his shoulder like a rifle.

“We’ve done it,” I said. “Don’t you see?” I turned my back on him and advanced five steps towards the lines. I knew all about this moment because I had pictured it throughout the day. I would head to the left and the captain to the right like gentlemen and ladies at a cotillion. I looked hard for someone to recognize on our side, but all I could see was a shifting mass of khaki and grey.

On the sixth step I stopped and looked back at the captain. He stood with his shovel pointing at the sky. One minute. It was a time for shameless running, head bent low, a time to remove one’s scent from the hungry guns. But the captain would not move.

A Turkish sniper fired from a distant hill. There was a moment of pure silence. I stood sideways on, a shoulder and a cheek for each side of the war. I was still waiting for someone to call my name. The Australians replied with a volley of hatred. I looked down at my feet and scratched the earth with the tip of my boot. It was smooth and flat. When I caught the captain’s eye, he nodded thoughtfully at the place to dig and walked towards me, holding out the shovel.

END

Andrew Bynom has written both contemporary and historical fiction set in Turkey, especially Istanbul. His work has been published in The Tusculum Review and Armchair Aesthete. He recently finished a novel, The Executioner’s Race, in which tulips and calligraphy intertwine. He lives in Carbondale, Illinois.

Julia Pierpont

There are some days, whole days, when we do not wear our glasses. These are days without blackboards, Saturdays and Sundays when we do not have to leave the house at all. We are nearsighted, all of us, which means we cannot see past the pages in our books. Some of us prefer the world that way. We are of Irish descent, with fair skin and many freckles, and without our glasses our skin looks clear and unblemished, like the inside of an apple when it is first cut open, before the air turns it mushy and brown. The day we got glasses was a sad day for those of us who had forgotten about our freckles.

At school we sit in the back row of the classroom and hope that the teacher calls only on other people. We have had a lot of time to think about it and have decided that it is not a very good school. For one thing, it is free, and generally things that are free are worthless. One of us pointed out that this is not the case on Halloween, when candy is free, and so maybe holidays are an exception to this rule. Then another one of us pointed out that even on holidays nothing is really free, since on Halloween people are just trying to avoid being tricked. Trick-or-treating is a very dirty business. It’s the same for Christmas when, in exchange for presents, Santa gets his milk and cookies, and on Valentine’s Day, when, for chocolate and roses, people get each other. Everyone plays along so as not to wake up with lumps of coal, or alone.

In class sometimes we play Hangman or Tic-Tac-Toe. We stare at bright lights on the ceiling and then look away, so that a blue spot in the shape of the light follows wherever we look, the floating absence of light, which we use to obstruct the view of Mr. Carton, who tries to teach us math. We think we are the only ones who know about these spots, because we have never heard anyone else talk about them.

It is agreed, unanimously, that gym period is the worst of all the periods. Like we said, it is not a very good school, but there is enough in the budget to buy bats and balls, and with these bats and balls we play intramural softball. We are always the last ones picked even though we are not the fat kids. Florence Barlaz gets picked before we do, and she wears undershirts when probably she should be wearing a training bra.

Often, when everyone else has been picked and we are the only ones left without a team, we picture ourselves stopping the draft. We imagine dropping to our knees and pleading with the coach, who is also Mr. Carton. We could have a team of our own, we’d say, like the old people’s lane at the swimming pool. That way we wouldn’t interfere with the real athletes in the class, the ones who monopolize the school’s three baseball gloves. We could play in that corner of the field, the patchy part that nobody waters, we don’t need much space because none of us can really throw that far.

Of course, we never say this, it just isn’t done. So we take off for the outfield, like it was what we wanted all along. We don’t even wait to hear the team captain assign positions, and so we do not know who is on first and who is shortstop, because it is hard to see in the sun and because we always go so long.

In intramural softball, there are too many kids in the outfield, not just us, but four or five aside from us, because the teams are too big. In the outfield, we pray. We pray the ball does not come any closer. We ask God to provide us with an invisible shield, something to deflect the ball from coming our way. Our family is not religious. This is the only time we pray.
If we had a ball we would practice with it at home. Some days after school we’ll throw apples in the air and try to catch them before they hit the kitchen floor. Then Bradley tells Mom to quit buying apples from the corner market because they are always so bruised. Mom is Bradley’s wife.

The walk back from school is not long, only about eleven or twelve minutes, and much less if we are having a speed-walking competition. The record is under seven minutes, though it is hard to know exactly without a stopwatch.

In the afternoons, we let ourselves in. We were always misplacing the one key Mom had made for us at the locksmith until we began hiding it in the pot of bushy blue hydrangeas by the front door. Mom would be very angry if she knew we did that, but she is pleased that we have stopped misplacing it, and besides one of us always keeps lookout for strangers who might be spying to see where we bury it.

When we get home from school we make this neat thing called fairy bread, which Bridget Lowy brought in to school once on her birthday. Bridget is the kind of person who brings in treats for other people on her own birthday, because she wants so much to be popular and for her birthday to be remembered. The way you make it is you take sliced bread and on top of it you spread butter and then you cover the whole thing with lots of rainbow sprinkles. Mom doesn’t buy sprinkles so instead we use sugar. We pile fairy bread onto a plate and eat it in front of the television.

Another thing we used to do after school is walk Peashake. Peashake is a basset hound that lives down the hill from us. The way it started was that we used to follow Peashake and his owner, Mrs. Hudnut, on their afternoon walks around the neighborhood. One day Mrs. Hudnut stopped, turned, and walked the ten yards back to us, where we were trying to keep a respectable distance.

“Would you like to walk Peashake in the afternoons?”

Yes, yes we would. Peashake was no beauty, about a foot tall on all fours with a whole lot of extra skin that hung in folds below his head, where his neck might have been. Peashake’s legs were so short and his ears were so long we thought maybe he’d been built to fly. He was not the breed of dog we would have chosen for ourselves. But Peashake was better than no dog at all, and good practice for Trotter, our future Icelandic sheepdog.

Walking Peashake was different than we’d imagined it. It was better. We liked the feel of him on the other end of the leash, the slight pull whenever we were walking too fast or too slow, whenever he wanted to smell a tuft of grass, or inspect a crack in the pavement. We liked how he sensed when we wanted to run with him, how our paces quickened together, all of us knowing without having to talk about it. Picking up Peashake’s poop was even grosser than we had imagined, mostly because none of us had expected it to be warm. But even that wasn’t so bad after a while, and Peashake seemed to like us even better than he liked Mrs. Hudnut, because we walked him for longer and sometimes brought him the crusts from our fairy bread.

Then autumn got older and the leaves started to come down in orange and yellow clumps, making a carpet on the school breezeway. When it got cold outside we played volleyball in the gymnasium. It was a painful sport, maybe because no one knew how to play it right, and the doughy parts between Florence Barlaz’s wrists and elbows would smack red for the whole next period. For most of the time we’d sit low between the rows of the wooden bleachers, close our eyes to the bright yellow of the gym, and listen to the squawk of rubber soles on the court.

Other things that happened. Bridget Lowy brought in a magazine with her face on the cover, and we were impressed until it came out during lunchtime that Bridget had made the cover herself, at home on her color printer, and then had pasted it onto an old issue of People. In math class, Mr. Carton continued to lecture us from behind the blue spots. We were getting C’s on all our tests, which was bad but not so bad that we needed to get anything signed by Mom or Bradley.

The days became more and more about walks with Peashake. He was soft and calm, and also he was like us in that he didn’t want to play ball. We had been seeing Peashake for about a month when something happened and then we couldn’t see Peashake anymore.

It was a Friday and we had just come from returning Peashake to Mrs. Hudnut’s backyard. We opened the front door and then went to rebury the key in the hydrangeas.

“What in hell are you doing?”

Bradley was in the doorway. He was home early. It couldn’t have even been five o’clock. He was still wearing his shirt from work, but it was untucked and he’d taken off his tie. He must have pulled the tie up, lengthwise, because he was still wearing his tie clip.

All at once we tried to explain about the key, how careful we were and how really it was safer here in this one place. He muted our chorus with a wave of his hand and spoke again.

“Where were you?”

We told him about Peashake and Mrs. Hudnut. Bradley couldn’t figure out who Mrs. Hudnut was. Older than Mom. Dark hair with some wiry gray ones that stood up on her head. Long, flowery skirts and lived alone with a basset hound because her husband was dead. Finally one of us gave in and mentioned the goiter, which was the sort of thing we knew Bradley noticed in other people.

Bradley’s eyes flew down the block and his lips curled at the edges. He was seeing the goiter. And then, without warning, he had set off after it, into the street and down the hill.

We tried to form a barricade against him, but Bradley is over six feet tall and really what could we do. We could shout after him, throw up our little white hands, flutter them like doves in a magic act, but still we couldn’t make Bradley disappear.

We didn’t follow him, we didn’t want to be there, but later we heard Bradley telling Mom what happened. Bradley marched down to that old broad’s house and told her it wasn’t right she should have her dog walked for free. He demanded that she pay for our services. Mrs. Hudnut told him that that didn’t interest her, and when Bradley got home his face and his neck were almost purple and his sleeves were pushed up to the elbows and he said we weren’t to walk Peashake anymore. The only good part was that Bradley got so worked up about the trouble with Peashake that he forgot to tell Mom about the key.

Another thing was it wasn’t so much that Bradley had come home early from work that Friday as that he had been fired, which was another reason he lost his temper so quick with Mrs. Hudnut and probably another reason why he wanted her money.
Then we didn’t need to get the key out of the hydrangeas for a while because Bradley was home for almost a whole week after that, on the couch in his underwear. He set up camp out there and sat with his two bare feet on either page of the newspaper, dripping cereal milk onto the classifieds.

The following Thursday, the door was locked again. When we’d gone all through the house and felt sure that Bradley was not just asleep or on the toilet, we skipped down to Mrs. Hudnut’s to see about Peashake.

When Mrs. Hudnut answered the door, she looked older, which we know is not really possible, and her goiter looked larger, which is maybe possible but probably not likely. We asked if we might take Peashake for a quick spin and a whiz. Mrs. Hudnut said Peashake had already had his walk, and so we asked if we could come in and say hello.

“I don’t think that’s such a good idea, Sarah dear.”

We could hear Peashake skittering around behind her. We could hear his dog tags clanking together. He had two, one that was maroon and shaped like a bone and engraved with his name, and the other a silver rectangle that said he’d gotten all his shots. Did he know we’d come to see him?

We must have been looking too long into the entryway behind her because just then Mrs. Hudnut shut the door a few inches and told us to go on home.

Back at the house we started crying in front of the television. Crying, we guessed, for loss of Peashake. We wanted to know what we looked like crying so we ran to the mirror, but faced with ourselves we couldn’t cry anymore. We took off our glasses. No, the crying was over. We went back to watching TV.

When it got to be seven o’clock and still no one was home we went into the kitchen to fix dinner. There wasn’t enough sugar to make the fairy bread – what was left sat in hardened hunks at the bottom of the box – so we dug out a package of butternut squash from the freezer and thought that would be okay, even though it could probably use some sugar, too. Unwrapped, it was orange and shiny and shaped like a building block. We dropped it into a bowl where it perched at an angle, not fitting, and we tried to mash it up with a fork but it was too frozen, so we popped the whole thing into the microwave just like that. We ate it burning hot on the edges and icy cold in the middle.

Mom and Bradley came home at the same time, though you couldn’t really say they came home together, because they weren’t talking to each other, and then they weren’t talking to us either.

The next afternoon we came home to a pot with no hydrangeas, only a little soil at its base, which we scraped through, got under our nails. No key. We wished we hadn’t been turned away once from Mrs. Hudnut’s, because this would have been a good time to be not alone. Instead we sat in the darkening and told each other stories and squished ants. We thought about breaking in through a window, but none of the neighborhood boys played ball near our house and besides we’d need to tell about the key eventually. We wondered about when Mom and Bradley would get home, about what time Peashake would be having his walk, about who would steal a blue hydrangea.

Mom surprised us by coming home without Bradley. When she asked us why we weren’t inside we told her about the local hydrangea thief, and she rolled her eyes and said the plant had died, she’d uprooted it herself. When we told her she must have also uprooted our key she was angry and flared her left nostril at us and said she didn’t know when she’d have time to make another key and why did we have to be so goddamn irresponsible.

“We’re so sorry,” we told her.

She stopped, her own key half in the door, and looked down at us. “Who’s we?”

“I,” we said. “I meant I’m sorry.”

She opened the door. “Please, Sarah. One is enough.”

She went inside, and then, so did we.

END

Julia Pierpont is an MFA candidate at NYU, where she is a Rona Jaffe Foundation Graduate Fellow. This is her first published piece.