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Here is a boy, barely thirteen, broken, lying in the road, twisted metal around him, twisted metal in him. Here is his heart, pierced by the shrapnel of the truck, a truck no longer, now a confusion of tangled wire and torn steel and glass pebbles.
What is the colour of pain? In the growing carmine tide that creeps in her heart-mind, Mathilde would swear all that hurts is red, like her scratched hand, her wounded wrists, her slashed ankles. It’s the blood trickling from her fingers.
The soldiers slit the woman’s throat every evening before bedding down so they can sleep without worry. She mocks them but never fights the knife coming to her. Two of the men still take turns watching her in case she heals before the rest of the cadre wakes.
Muna shuts the storeroom door as quietly as she can. Holding a just-waxed bundle of letters to her chest, she sticks out her head to check the bookshop floor. If she walks between the shelves on the far right, she can slip out unnoticed in ten heartbeats. The main door of the bookshop is propped open, the sun shining after what feels like a year of sodden clouds and sludged streets—she can’t wait to feel its warmth on her skin.
The possible worlds hung and spun in five-dimensional space like ever-twisting jewels of sand-brown and burgundy, frost and ocean. Mother, Father, and Amelia made their camp on a relatively flat piece of spacetime, stretched between three clusters of possible worlds. Mother and Father were careful campers. They’d drilled Amelia on the dangers of disturbing the possible worlds, so she watched them float and sway from the corner of her eye, making sure that her soft footsteps didn’t jostle them.
First off, your name. I remember that night clearly. We were tucking you into your big boy bed upstairs after reading from your new book about the joy of going potty. A lavender breeze swirled open the curtains, revealing the constellations and full moon over the fields. Solemnly you announced, “I am poopy from the stars.” A moment later you soiled yourself loudly for emphasis and Papa made a quick escape, because he always says that diapers are Not His Thing.
You are sitting on the third-floor balcony facing the beach when you see it breach the water. It rises upward with a snort of steam and sparks of flame, lifting its spiked reptilian head from the waves. It’s silhouetted in moonlight and bisected by the surface line. You know it’s too big to be there. You know because water that close to the coast never drops below fifty feet and this thing, breathing heavily in the ocean air and stretching its toothy jaw, must be all head and no body, but there it is.
Call me Philoctetes. My real name doesn’t matter, and I wouldn’t be allowed to tell you what it is, anyway. Security concerns, you understand. What you need to know about me is that I was a US Army Green Beret—one of the Quiet Professionals. Usually tasked with working with the locals in counterinsurgency efforts and the like. The stuff that doesn’t—or shouldn’t—make the newspapers.
Finch’s dad always said a book could neither plow the earth nor feed a mare, so Finch wasn’t surprised when his secret bestiary turned out to be alive. He inherited it upon his father’s death in the summer of Finch’s fifteenth year. After burying his father in the meadow near his favorite horse’s grave, Finch read the handwritten will that wouldn’t have withstood the rigors of Law, but was good enough for them.
It’s only after they’ve loaded the moving truck halfway with boxes that the parents finally notice Parker’s gone. They spend three days yelling for him. Mom waits the longest, wanders the farthest into the forest in the dark. Her voice is a plea, an agonized howl, an echo of the day Eli closed his eyes and never opened them again. “Parker,” she cries, “Come on, be a good boy. Please.”
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