The Lake

The Window had gone missing. This had made Boy frantic, and he'd searched for it the night Alba went missing as Frau Holda lit candles for the windows to help Alba home. After a few days Boy realized he needed to make a new plan... Something without the window.

Boy took a photo for Alba. He said she'd want it to remember, because the errand would take years.

He had made a lunch.

Actually Frau Holda made it, but Boy would tell you differently because of the level of care he had to take in instructing her what exactly must be in the sandwich, and how, carefully, it should be assembled and packed with some fruit.

Boy took it with him down to the side of the lake.
He spent an hour there, telling the lady where it was she needed to be waiting, and explaining when she must be there. It was very serious. Then he took the half of the sandwich he hadn't eaten and threw it into the lake. That's when he took out the camera, just before she left on her errand. Boy would say the splash in the water was when she waved. Boy walked back to the house.

Holda asked him why he kept throwing his sandwiches in the lake.
Boy told her the lady was his friend, but even so it was right that he should offer tribute when he asked her for favors... that's just how it was done.
“What did you ask for?” Holda asked him.

“I asked her to help Alba.” Boy said.

Holda's expression changed. She put an arm around him and hugged him, “My brother Japhy used to make sandwiches for Alba's mother when they went on trips.”
Holda smiled, “She liked them the same way you do.”

Boy nodded, “She still does.”

.

Through the Looking Window

Alba really woke up halfway through the window.
It started simply enough... as these things will. She half-rolled out of bed expecting to find the floor, and then presumably the wash room. She'd just gone down to rest her eyes. She'd had a strange dream... there were voices somewhere that she couldn't quite hear, and a train. A very horrible train headed into a fire, and there was a rainbow of milk and castles made of ice.

Boy had been playing with Olaf's window again, which Jacob had found in the remains of the burned out barn as they got ready to rebuild it.
“It's magic, like the lady on the front of the Argo,” Boy had told her when she wondered aloud why it wasn't burnt like everything else. Boy had been reading a lot lately. He was allowed to read these books because he was so much older than Alba he told her, having been planted before she was born. Alba asked what he thought of Homer and the rest, and he told her, “I don't know... I'm only seven.”

She didn't think the window would be talking to her anytime soon, and she said as much.
“I do,” he responded. That made her stop. He was cut from a tree, and he talked to her... but is that what he'd meant? She was glad his arm was grafting – it was amazing what Ethel and Frau Holda had been able to do... his new hand looked so much like his first. Each time they changed the burlap tied around it he seemed to be able to use it more.

Alba tucked the window away when he was distracted. She didn't get cross with him for playing with it like she did before... she just, she didn't want him getting into anything.

Alba asked him if he wanted to play a game. Irenka had brought over one that was new. It was a money game, and you tried to buy real estate and then charge other people rent. Boy said he didn't enjoy it much. “If things happen over and over, I'd rather live it then pretend it. That's more fun,” he shrugged. “Besides,” he said wistfully, “You can change when you live.”

Alba took the window and headed upstairs.

“You should close it first,” Boy warned her very seriously, “...before your nap.”

Alba trudged up the stairs and into her room. “She never listens, Cadejo” Boy said, “And I don't like where she's going. I hope she's ok.” Cadejo whined, flipping the bone he'd been trying to gnaw on to one side and laying his chin on it, yawning.

Alba wasn't taking a nap. She just dropped the window frame against the bed, and then looked at her pillow and decided maybe it wasn't such a bad idea after all... Just to close her eyes for a second. Her foot knocked the square wooden frame, but she let it hit the ground as she fell onto cool sheets and a goose feathered oblivion.

Her eyelids fluttered and she was in a fog. It was cold, and she pulled her blanket up around herself. It looked like a bright red overcoat. It was night and the stars were out, but it was really early afternoon, she knew that. She heard water, something calling to her. She felt something watching her.

“Be careful, Alba,” her father told her.
“I will, dad,” She promised him sleepily as she got up to go to the wash room. That's when it happened - Alba saw the floor of her room rush up and pass her. Wind caught her hair. Her feet kicked through a nothingness that was bright, sunny and blue.
Alba landed none too comfortably in an empty field of grass with sun in her eyes. Above her she could see a square in the sky that looked like a patch of her ceiling.

She had no idea where she was.

Things We Lost in the Fire

Alba had gone out.

She went to the Houselands, looking through the sticks for Olaf. She didn't feel comfortable around some of the new neighbors. Some distant relatives, but mostly strangers were coming over from the Old Country more and more frequently. Most of them were average, really. To tell the truth it was just Mrs. Pithiviers. Everyone liked her but she made Alba feel like she was being cut up into little nasty bits every time Mrs. Pithiviers looked at her with that smile full of teeth.

“I don't like her,” the New Boy had agreed.

Alba suspected he was just saying it out of solidarity, but then he said, “Her house isn't really candy, no matter what she tells them, and she knows that. She is bad.”

So Alba had gone out... She'd invited the New Boy, even invited him to Mr Schonberg's store for ices, but he said he had something important to do that day. Lately that meant elaborate constructions of bed frame parts, tin cans and pillows attached together with colored yarn in the basement.

So Alba had gone out.

She wished she hadn't. She cried when she thought about it that night in the basement. But she had, and she couldn't change that, and there it was.

When she came back there was screaming.

You could see the smoke for miles... Frau Holda and Kacper were struggling with something, dragging it away from the barn on the far side and beating a fire out with blankets. Jacob was yelling orders to everyone, directing buckets of water to the barn. Irenka and the children were helping to carry water. The Cats were everywhere, jumping underfoot and looking scared, lost. One had lost some hair.

Alba ran up to the barn but the heat was too intense and she fell back... “Where is Muselon?” she yelled to Jacob, but he didn't know.

Someone was running across the yard with a full bucket of water and their foot kicked a wooden toy car. Alba froze...

“Where is Boy?” she said, mostly to herself. Alba turned around looking for him but couldn't see him and she screamed it again. Ethel, the nice lady from down the road was there with a sudden hand on her shoulder. She pointed and Alba followed her gesture to Kacper, as Alba realized with horror what he and Holda had been dragging from the barn.

She ran up to them and at first Boy seemed right... he was talking, but he was covered in soot and his skin looked dry as kindling.

“I saved Cadejo for you,” Boy said, talking about a bundle of rags he clutched against himself. As Alba knelt down, something wriggled out of the rags and barked. It was a dog, and it licked Alba's face.

“Where did this come from?” she asked.

The Boy looked at her with something like relief ... maybe a little pride, “You can really see him?”

“Don't talk, just rest” Kacper told him, still propping him up as he lay in the grass and making sure he was getting enough sun.

“What happened?” She asked Holda.

“She did it,” Boy tried to point to the barn but the hand which had held Cadejo was burnt black. As he raised his hand it snapped off at the wrist and the arm split, groaning, cracking. Ethel screamed, Cadejo barked, Holda whispered to her dead mother and Alba stared in shock. Kacper pulled him up, wrapping a rag tightly around the arm. He said they needed to get inside the house. Alba saw him step on the hand, crushing it into cinder and ash in the grass. She screamed insensibly for him to stop. She tried to gather the parts together but as she touched each piece it burst into ashes, staining her fingers black with soot.

“No, dear...” said Holda, taking her shoulders, “It's all right.” her voice was uncertain, as if talking through her thoughts, “He's not a real boy yet. We have some of the cedar left... It could be fresh enough, we can make him another hand...”

“Yes,” Ethel nodded in appraisal, “His craft is old, but I should be able to help... I may have something back at the house.” She left to get supplies.
Mrs. Pithiviers was in the distance, talking through her grief in circles to Jacob, something about filling her lantern oil. No one was really listening. Alba locked gaze with her red, tear-stained eyes and saw the concern fall away like a mask, “...if only someone had been watching him... maybe then...” She was an image of piety and sorrow as she put a hand back to Jacob's shoulder and commanded his attention anew.

"She hates me because I know it's not candy,” Boy said as they carried him in a blanket.
“Shush” Holda told him, “no one hates you.” He said he was thirsty.

Holda and Ethel worked on him into the night. Jacob brought some tools from the shed after the barn was put out. They never did find Muselon or any part of her. “She went through the window, ” Boy had said, but he had been in and out of consciousness since the sun went down. Alba went down into the basement with Cadejo, and discovered Boy had taken the legs from her old brass baby bed, making it into a dog bed. Cans of food were attached by bits of colored yarn. A note read, “Blue is for Tuesdays.”

“Oh! I want a lobster claw!” she heard Boy holler upstairs. The others alternated between telling him he was being very brave and listing things that a five fingered hand could do better than a claw.

Alba had checked on him, but couldn't bring herself to stay up there right now. She sat down, fed Cadejo, and cried a little while brushing soot from her dress.

The Ardennes

Alba had found the New Boy playing with Olaf's window a few times after she'd brought it back.
She was very stern with him, and told him that it belonged to a friend of hers, and it wasn't a toy, while hiding it as best she could in a variety of places.

"I know that," the New Boy said. He was busy with something very important, and besides it was his window too. She corrected him and resolutely declared that she would hear nothing else on the topic.

A few mornings later she had been milking Muselon, and was getting ready to take a bucket of milk inside before tending to the chickens for the Egg Money.
The New Boy burst into the barn, which was strange enough, yelling, "It's time! It's time - Hurry! You have to help him!"

Alba stared at him.
The New Boy was frantic. Hardly rational. He ran up to her grabbing her wrist, "I'll help, hurry! Time is different there..." The Boy plunged her hand into the bucket.

Alba gasped. The bottom of the bucket was freezing cold and dry -maybe even windy. She felt something. "Grab him!" The New Boy yelled at her.
Alba's hand came back up pulling a rough green fabric attached to something heavy. There was the sound of an explosion and she screamed, knocking the pail over.

The milk drained into the hay... The New Boy said, "That's ok. I think it's ok." He looked up at her and said it was nearly lunchtime, asking if they could make some sandwiches.
The bucket was empty.

Alba changed her clothes and they ate at the stump, and she asked him about everything but he pretended not to know what she was talking about. "We didn't have any water," he said, "but I think it was ok."

**********

Years later when Alba was married, while sitting on their porch and watching their children play with Azeban in the yard, Mitch would turn to her and ask if he had ever told her that story about Belgium. He wouldn't have. He'd mention how this one time, under fire, he'd found himself crouching over a bit of melted snow near what had been the cooking fire before shells started falling. He'd tell her a little about the war, about ghost stories, about being sure he'd seen guys from his battalion with some woman looking back at him. He'd say he found out later that they'd all already been hit. He'd have a strange expression and mention the archer's bow he thought she'd been aiming at him.
He'd tell her he got distracted. That he heard, well he thought he heard, Alba's voice, and for just a moment he thought a hand came up out of that puddle, soft and smooth, pulling him down into it - which was crazy. He'd say how he was pretty sore at getting his jacket wet in the cold, how he must have slipped, been delusional from lack of sleep and stress and the chaos. He'd mention being mad until he'd noticed a chunk of shrapnel which had punched a hole in his helmet the size of a quarter and knocked it off his head at probably just about the same time. He'd imagine that was the closest shave he'd had.

In her lifetime, Alba would never really put the two together.

Persiphone Calls

194X

Alba and Thalia had the Sunday off from the factory and had some pictures taken. It was nice to have a day out... A day without the set, center, bang.

Thalia took it upon herself to look after Alba because she hadn't been eating much. She said she was worried about Mitch, of course, "being over there," as she put it. Thalia never pressed her, it's not like there was much conversation over the noise of the line... Anyway they both had their reasons for hard work.

She made sure Alba got some breakfast in her today. Then they went shopping. Thalia noticed Alba was looking at some dresses.
"You'll be shopping for something white soon, I know it," Thalia smiled.
Alba smiled back and flipped a dress sleeve at her, "It's not fair... I can't do it with you, you look like a movie star!"
"Oh, can it sister," Thalia snorted, "You'll be positively glowing when he walks off that boat. Why I bet you'll vibrate right out of your skin!"
Mitch would finish his tour. Mitch would come home with a ring in his pocket and a promise in his heart. Mitch would live. Alba told herself that.
Right now he was somewhere her parents would have known. There may be bullets and mortar fire... there may not. Did they kill differently on Sundays? She wondered.

If she knew where he was she could just go there. She could see him, touch his hand or face. She would know he was right, good... alive. He wasn't allowed to say where he was, and besides he'd be packed and marched before that letter even crossed a censor's desk. She'd promised him she wouldn't come because of the danger, of course that was why she wanted to go so badly. She could be there and back in a second.... She could do it as fast as think it.
He was so far away. Everything seemed so far away. She thought of Bérénice and what she was doing. She thought of the letters, and how they'd gotten shorter, had dwindled and then finally stopped... How it had all happened... How she couldn't change it when it happened again.

She thought of how very much she wanted to be doing something. Something bigger. Alba had already been there in a way, she reminded herself... and she wasn't Bérénice.
So she was stuck, waiting. Riveting on the assembly, because the Secretary Pool didn't let you feel the vengeance in your hands. That's what she'd named her rivet gun, "The Vengeance."

Thalia didn't know everything, of course.
Alba never had much use for hate. What good had it ever brought her? None. Set, center, bang. She worked the line for Mitch, sure, and for the other boys - just like all the other girls. She thought about the other-other girls working for the other-other boys, but that certainly felt different.
Sometimes when she drifted away she thought about falling through windows. Set.
She thought about Olaf. About fire and snow. She felt sweat trickle down an arm. Center.
She thought about the wolves... Bang.

Alba and Thalia went to a matinee. She finally saw it in the newsreels, and recognized it for what it was. She recognized she'd missed it. For all the checking, the waiting, the fear... she had missed it.
Sitting in that dark theater, popcorn dangling from her open, frozen lip, Alba understood better how it must have been for Olaf. It happened years ago for her and left her expecting it to happen every day, and here she was seeing it and yet in her mind it was impossible - it couldn't have happened yet. Not yet. The newsreel was - what? A month old? When was her last trip? Five weeks? Six? Had she missed him by days or by hours? With years to prepare, how was she too late? When she got back the first time, Olaf had called it done... history.
Alba thought about the wolves.
On the line the next day, Alba welcomed the numbness in her hands and the pull and the spasm of the gun as it wrenched her shoulders. She thought about the wolves. Bang. She knew that every rivet she drove, she drove deep into their hearts.

Pyrois, Aeos, Aethon, and Phlegon

Alba was looking for a telescope.
She knew that the things she'd been seeing made little sense. She'd been squinting all afternoon at the sun, asking The New Boy what it was she couldn't see in it.

"You're sure you can't look at the sun?" he asked.
"Yes."
"But that's silly. Why not? It's right there," he'd say, pointing to it. Sometimes he didn't understand her or the way she thought at all.
"I can't look at things like you can."
"My hair likes it. My fingernails too." he told her. "Maybe if you just try harder?"
"I tried hard this morning."
"...what happened?" he asked.
"It made me see things. Weird things."
The New Boy asked her what kind of things, and also why that should be surprising in the first place considering that was the entire point of looking.
"Colors. First there is a mountain, and then there is no mountain, and then there is." She told him.
"Yeah, that sounds familiar." Boy looked and just saw the big bright dot he always did. It made him happy. He waved to it.
"I see things that aren't always there sometimes too," he told her.
"I know. Dogs and new neighbors and who knows what else... Oh, and there was that thing by the lake last week."
"She's nice, she's my friend."
"You told me that, yeah." Alba had looked through every box in the shed and couldn't find a telescope.
"Why do you want a telescope?" he asked.
"So when the sun goes down I can look at the stars."
"You can't look at stars either?" The Boy was shocked.
"No - I can, but I want to see them better," she said.
"You might find a relative up there," he said, "if you do would they have to answer your questions, like what's behind the sun and things, or is that just for leprechauns?"
Alba knew The New Boy was a little insane... but she had to admit the idea of things she couldn't see sure rubbed her the wrong way. It was a problem looking for a solution.
"I think if you could see the trains from farther away you'd get a better head start." The New Boy offered, "Maybe you'd win a race with a telescope."
Alba stopped rummaging and thought about it... "Boy, you know - that's actually not a bad idea at all! Help me look in the barn."
She marched for the big wooden building before she remembered Boy's phobia. Alba turned to see him standing where she left him. "Oh come on... Please? It won't be that bad... and I can't get in the boxes by myself..."

"No." Boy said.

Alba didn't know what it was about the barn... it wasn't things made from wood - she'd already established that... "Just for a little bit? You can say hello to Muselon... I know you like her."
"No," Boy said. She may have heard him whisper something else, she wasn't sure. The look on his face though...
"Ok! Hey... we don't have to." She said quick as she could, "I know - let's go to Mr Schonberg's and see if he has any Italian ice? Ok? I'd really like some!"
The New Boy nodded. He took a step toward her, then wagged his head from side to side as if chiding himself while he turned back to get his toy car.

When he caught up with her The New Boy reached up and took her hand.
"Fire is dangerous," he said.
"Yes," she said not understanding him at all, "Yes it is."

Khepri's Eternal Embrace

Irenka Nowakowski had left her laundry hanging to check in on the baking. She was gone for just a moment.

That's how these things always start, she thought to herself, even as she and Jacob from down the way were forcing open the Frost baby's mouth. Jacob said something inappropriately appropriate as he wedged his hands between emerging baby teeth the size of walnuts.

Both had come at the sound of Sorina giving a horrible screech. The source of her screaming seemed to be the sight of her brother's head wedged inside the Frost baby's jaw. Irenka had suspected something of this nature might happen for several weeks. Brimir had been almost fixated on the boy's head for some time. No one knew if it was the shape, the texture, the soft whispy hair and pliant flesh surrounding a hard target... In any event Brimir had decided on a favorite chew toy. Lucky for everyone Nicolae came from a sturdy people.

Kacper immediately commissioned a wooden "Teether Nicolae" to be carved. It was common in Brimir's native Niflheim to give small logs or tree trunks to teething babies to gnaw on. Mr. Nowakowski suggested that perhaps the local wood had some analgesic effect. Mrs. Nowakowski suggested that maybe logs were simply in front of them and easy to reach in a hurry.

Beside the River Make For You a Tunnel of Green Gloom

Granta had not minded her renaming terribly. Sometime before Alba was born, the family moved. The family name changed, at least that's what Alba had always presumed when Aunt Holda told her, "We all got new names back then, I guess it just happens over time."
Her mother, she was told, was normally placid, sweet ... Frau Holda would describe her as a gentle soul whenever Alba asked. She chose her moments if circumstances demanded though, and little may have withstood the tides of her mood when it turned dark.
"She had a bit of a falling out with your uncle Ogma, you know..." Holda told her. "He was a brash one. Always wanted tribute, Ogma did. He was about showing off. A bit of a silver tongued braggart, really. That wasn't your mother's style. She didn't make waves. She was like water on a stone. Quiet. Resolute. Inevitable. Oh he'd make a right mess of things, but you'd enjoy hearing him do it."
"What made them argue?" Alba asked her.
Holda looked intently at the dough as she kneaded, powdering it and preparing it to be rolled out.
"They didn't agree about our place in the world," Holda said. "He was too old-country. He refused to leave it behind. Simple as that really."

Alba didn't recall much about her mother. She said as much.
"I remember her smell," she said, "but I probably couldn't describe it. I remember how much she liked living by the river with father." Alba looked at her hands, wondering if they bore any resemblance at all. "The way she used to look at me and Bérénice," Alba recalled, "It would make me feel so loved."

"Well," Holda said, putting the rolling pin down and cutting Alba a corner of the dough to eat, "I'd say if you remember that then you remember her as she'd have wanted."

Alba chewed and they both watched The New Boy - who had been busy in a corner for the last half hour in an elaborate game composed of yarn and what he described as Alba's invisible puppy. He looked up suddenly as if just remembering an important errand, "Can I have a cookie?" Holda agreed and went to the cupboard.
While she was away the New Boy told Alba, "She's nice and I like her. She helps you when you need it. She's my friend." Alba nodded and gave a small, polite noise - which is what she had taken to doing whenever The New Boy would declare things in his odd manner. She could hardly be faulted, as she had no way of knowing that he wasn't talking about Frau Holda anyway.

The Frost Baby

Kacper and Irenka took a new baby, Brimir, into the house from a Mr. and Mrs. Frost. Like Sorina and Nicolae's parents, they were detained in Europe by pressing matters.
"She's enormous." Alba said.
Irenka explained to her that the baby's family was from a northern country, Niflheim, which sounded like maybe it was somewhere in Germany. Anyway it was very cold there. They needed to be big-boned for the winters.
"She's enormous..." Alba said.
The New Boy warned Alba not to get too close.

Kacper, the Coast & Friends

Kacper and Irenka took baby Nicolae out to the creek to gather rocks and watch insects. Alba noted how fast he was growing and Kacper explained that it was common in the boy's family. They grew so fast that they'd often be left to feed themselves when very young. He was hoping the parents would be back from the old world soon... Their business turned out to be more complicated than they hoped.
Irenka brought sandwiches and some delicious pierogi for everyone to eat. She'd selected the creek bank just in case Nicolae turned out to be as prone to allergies as his sister was.

Sorina was back at the Milesian house, playing with the New Boy. The boy would set up some complicated structure in the basement, and the other person was supposed to navigate it with the lights out. Alba wasn't sure what the game was called... She just knew that unlike Sorina she hadn't been any good at it and her shin still hurt.

The Aegean in the Garden

Frau Holda had decided that morning to cut a fresh stalk of everlastings, perhaps for a dinner table bouquet. She stood in her garden holding a cutting and remembered how much her mother used to like them. They would have been sprinkled at her feet before a hunt, or occasionally (though less successfully) if Holda had just broken something.
Holda hadn't thought of her in a while.

She thought of Alba, and how she would coo at the Oneiroi in the elms as Artemis cradled her.
Holda thought of the New Boy - the Cedar tree. Artemis was always fond of that tree. She had helped plant it when the seed was brought. Holda saw her mother in her mind's eye, cold and stretched out on that bed... so small and dry. They had found her in '26.

Holda noticed she was standing among anenome with petals crimson red. She looked down into her hand and found a stalk not of everlasting, but of aconite... the poison wolfsbane she would watch her mother apply to the solstice arrows when she was very little, so very long ago.

...War and death were coming.

Saudade

Alba hadn't seen Olaf at the houselands for a few weeks. The longer he was gone, the more regularly she looked for him. Over several months she had been meeting with him every few days or so to have a talk and she brought him sandwiches... "You can't live on sunshine," she would say, which made him laugh. Now it had been nearly a month since she last saw him and she was worried.

When she last saw him, he seemed to have been talking to himself. He had spun around in circles when she arrived, not saying hello to her right away but instead acting like he was following something invisible on the ground... He was smiling, and despite the clearly strange experiences he'd had and the things that she had seen, with his chronologic window and wild claims, she was beginning to think he had gone finally and utterly insane.

"Hello Cadejo," Olaf had said, kneeling down as if talking to some phantom gnome, "How has our mistress been?" Olaf jerked his head back slightly as if at some noise and then reached out to scratch at the open air with his fingers. He stood and she asked him what he was doing...
"I was talking with your dog... Obviously Alba, what a question!"

Alba had asked him what he did, out here in the houses by himself so much. He told her it helped him think. Actually, what he said was that he liked the houses - because being around them helped remind him to remember what hasn't happened yet. Alba knew that Olaf and sense were not commonly acquainted, and it often took her some time to piece together something like a narrative, no matter what he was saying... He went on to say that this kind of remembering helped him because he could do it before the time in which he forgot everything, since it was always easiest to remember things before they were forgotten.

Alba blinked. "What made you forget?" she asked.
"Oh... I forgot." he told her.
He went on to say that something had happened, and he was only now starting to piece things back together the way they should be.

"You mean something will have happened?" she said teasing him.
"No," he said turning to look at her... "something happened, but something will happen again - and that's why I have to remember. We may know the end of something, we may even discover the beginning, but those are two small things when compared to the universe of time between."
Olaf had taken off his jacket and rolled up his sleeves when they sat down. While they talked, Olaf kept throwing sticks out into the houses... He would reach down and suddenly have one, and then throw it away again. She had no idea where they were coming from. "How did you get the scar on your arm?" Alba asked him. Olaf looked down at his wrist, then at the stick he was holding in his hand. He smiled and said that he'd made a trade once. He threw the stick and said that he'd do it all again.

That was over three weeks ago.
She had searched his house last time she was here. She had stood on the doorstep for a long time, not wanting to enter. It was harder to look around inside once she had. Every step and every corner felt like an intrusion, as if she would walk through a door and see him, but she feared he would be angry at her for being there. She found nothing, the house was empty and silent save for lonely gusts of wind through the attic, and her own footsteps on the planks of flooring.

Today she was startled to find the house was entirely gone. Every stick.

She rushed out into the field but there was nothing but wild flowers and grass. Nothing to mark the passing.
She sat for a while, wondering what it meant, watching the flowers bend in the breeze. The rooftops in the ground around her seemed especially hollow today.

She got up and as she was brushing the grass from her skirt she noticed something that looked like crown molding sitting a little bit away. She walked over and picked it up, pulling something larger from the grass.
Alba had found one of Olaf's windows. It was dirty and paint-chipped, and had been in the rain.
She walked it back to the car and drove home with it... wondering what had happened to her friend.

Sorina & The Incident

Sorina tried to follow the New Boy from Kacper’s house, but her allergies flared up. Irenka put her in the shower and she was fine, but everyone agreed it was scary, so Sorina got some extra ice cream of her choosing and the New Boy even said he’d stop by sometime to play some games.

The Commonalities of Blood and Soil

Alba had tied her shoes tightly and taken her neighbor's bicycle down to the railroad station. She had long thought if they just put the trains in opposing queues on parallel tracks and ran them one after another people would get a lot more races in. As it was she really only had the chance to race once before she got hungry and headed back.
When she got home she had a new Nephew or something.
"Alba, this is the new boy..." Frau Holda said as she introduced her to a wooden boy standing where the old Cedar had grown, which was now just a fresh, moist stump beneath his shoes. "Bérénice stopped by while you were out and carved him. He was running around naked so we had to put him in some of your old clothes..."
Frau Holda went back to her chores and left Alba with the new boy, who stood atop the stump of Cedar which she and Bérénice used to play under. Alba took this in. She realized her hands were tired from gripping the bicycle's handle bars. "Bérénice didn't stay?”
“No,” he said.
“I liked that tree,” she said.
“Thank you,” he said.
That wasn't quite what she meant. “Did she say anything?”
“She said that sometimes to save a thing you must destroy it...”
“Oh. Anything else?”
“She told me to ask you to name me. But she said you wouldn't know what my name was yet.”
“You're not named Tree?”
“No. ...not anymore.”
“Oh. Well. I suppose it's nice to meet you then.”
"Hello." The boy replied. His voice had a sort of soft flute quality she decided. He smelled like the tool shed after a rainstorm... While she wasn't quite listening he asked her how her morning had been. She considered him, wondering if he'd stay on that stump forever. She set the bike down and sat in the grass, "I was in a race. I lost. How was yours?"
"I got cut out of myself," he said.
"What's that like, being created?"
"Itchy. Mrs. Frekke says she has some linseed oil for me to bathe in later."
"Have you stood there all day?"
"No... I ran around a lot in the beginning. Whenever I stop moving though it feels strange ...being someplace else."
"You'll get used to it, I'm sure. We all do. Why didn't Bérénice name you when she made you?"
“She didn't make me. She just cut the rest away from me. I've been growing for a while.”
“I know. We used to play under you...”
“I saw. Why did you burn your house down?”
After some confusion, she realized he meant the playhouse. "It wasn't completely burned down. I was trying to bake cookies," she said a bit crossly.
"I'd like to try cookies," he offered.
"I was lighting the stove..."
"The wooden stove?"
"It was a stove. That is what stoves are for. It was stupid to make it out of wood." She hadn't realized what she'd said until she'd already said it, and added quickly, "I didn't mean anything by that... just that things that are supposed to hold fire shouldn't be wood..."
He nodded, looking at his fingers as he flexed them... "No it's true... Fire is dangerous."
“My friend Cici says that trees have bones. Is that true?”
“I think it is now... so yes... except I'm not a tree anymore, so maybe not.”
She watched him sit down on the stump next to her, “Listen... what kind of name would you like?”
“I already have a name,” he corrected her, “You just haven't given it to me yet. What's your dog's name?” he asked.
Alba was confused. “I don't have a dog. There are some chickens next door, and Holda has cats...”
“No,” the boy said, “You have a dog. Maybe you haven't met him yet.”
They both noticed it was getting late. She asked him, "Do you like sunsets?"
"Yeah, but sometimes," he said while stretching his fingers out towards the horizon, "they make me a little hungry."
Alba went inside and got some sandwiches. They both sat and watched the colors in the sky.
Boy discovered he liked cucumber with cream cheese.

Apples of the Fallen

Down the street from the Milesian house lived an immigrant family that had been close friends with Alba’s father, Japheth. The husband, Mr. Kacper Nowakowski, was engaged in the import and exportation of goods and (though Alba never quite understood it all) some business with the navigation of international laws. His wife Irenka had been a nurse, and Kacper’s moderate success in business afforded he and his wife the ability to care for a number of children of peculiar needs from various localities.

Today with Mr. Nowakowski’s help Alba took a photo of a sleepy baby named Nicolae who was staying with them, along with his older sister Sorina while their parents were out of the country on business.
Mr. and Mrs. Nowakowski had set up a special room with two big picture windows - one that let in night and one that let in day. Mr. Nowakowski put up a bed sheet over the day window, and according to the instructions left by his parents they both took turns holding baby Nicolae up to the filtered sunlight for a few minutes each hour, just until his hair began to smoke. Eventually Nicolae would be able to play in the yard in broad daylight just like his older sister.

Olaf's Window to Gone World

Alba visited the Houselands for years, sometimes running in the fields between rooftops, trying to get enough speed to break free of gravity. Sometimes she would spend hours in the grass, just watching the clouds, listening to the wind and writing in her journals until she could see the lights come out to play in the twilight.

Today she stopped at an outlying house… a worn, rundown thing. She wondered what type of lights would live there, beneath the paint flaking from wood and the worn gaps about the edges when the front door opened and a man walked out.

Alba froze as she realized he noticed her. His clothes were stitched where they were cut, splattered in paint, grease. They would have been bright once. He wore a hat and matching vest that would have been smart once too, back in another life. His eyes were wide, magnified by his goggle like glasses. She wasn’t sure if his expression was surprise or blindness.
“Well hello! Alba! How are you?” He waved her over.
Alba waited, her lunch basket hanging from a hand in an awkward way against her hip.
“I’ve never seen you before… when did you get here?” She asked.
“Yes you have…" he corrected her, “we will have had lunch and watched the sunsets… it was quite nice while it lasted.”
“No – I don’t remember doing that. How do you know my name?”

He smiled, it was disarming. Alba, never one disarmed by disarmament, didn’t like it at all. He said, “You always will have had problems remembering the things that haven’t happened just yet. You’re like me in my old age… just… in reverse.”
She tilted her head to one side, as if trying to better aim an ear that would understand him. “Tell me your name.”

“I don’t remember what they will have called me,” he told her, “You call me Olaf though… you will have said something about Czarnków, thinking I might have been born there in a book of yours. You tell me a story about a temple I would have built by shaping earth over my clenched fist and then removing it. You think you know me but you get it wrong, It’s rather peculiar.”
Alba stared at him.
“Oh, I’m sorry, I mean it will be a fine story. It’s just the situation will be peculiar because I will have no memory of right now, you see. So I won’t know why the story is important. I won’t know why many things are important. Oh! The windows!”

He rushed over to pick up a crude square of wooden planks roughly nailed together. He told her he’d made it. He made a window to what had already happened. She asked him how that worked. He explained he couldn’t use it anymore because he couldn’t remember what to look at. “I’m stuck, I’ve been having problems… sorting things out, lately.” he said, “I only seem to go forward these days, and the window - it only looks backward. I’m getting old. I survived war you know!”
“Which one?” she asked, certain he meant the great war.
“All of them I think. It goes dark.”

Alba nodded sympathetically for this old crazy man. He seemed nice, he seemed harmless and confused and mostly kind of lost. He seemed trapped in a prison in his head, trying to fit things that didn’t exist to a mold of the world. She could only imagine the private loneliness of wondering why imaginary things weren’t nicer to you… didn’t love you more… never came around. She felt truly bad for him. She looked at his framed piece of empty air and watched herself yell to Bérénice to get some water because she’d just set their playhouse on fire trying to bake some cookies when she was seven.
Alba dropped her lunch basket.

Bérénice and the Great Osanna. (For George Tiller & Stephen Johns... may you get home.)

One day, Alba’s sister Bérénice asked her to join her out at the Houselands. They packed lunches, got in the car (Bérénice was the only one who could drive) and filled an hour or so with gossip, idle talk and speculation about the nature of an Antarctican summer.
Alba had always enjoyed the houselands… it was located somewhere near the meadowlands, not quite next to the grasslands, along Crick Rd. No one exactly knew why the houses started growing there… or even if it wasn’t, as some had suggested, that the houses were in fact sinking there. Alba and Bérénice would go there when they had the day to themselves and take pictures among the halfway houses, scrape weeds away from window panes and generally explore. Bérénice carved her name in an attic once, kneeling on the grass inside, while Alba ran her fingers along the inside of the roof and joked that she would come back in twenty years to see how tall Bérénice’s name had gotten.
“You can’t even recognize one from the next whenever we come,” Bérénice teased.
“I can’t help that they grow,” Alba had said scowling, “Or … maybe that they change. I think they get done growing and that’s why we dont see them again.”
Bérénice turned the car onto a dusty clearing and parked beside a pretty little Bungalow that seemed nearly complete. They got out and ate lunch on the porch, kicking at the dirt as they talked. Bérénice seemed distracted, hardly touching her sandwich.
“What is it?” Alba finally asked.
Bérénice turned from the housetops, all lined in rows and jutting at angles and said to her, “I have to go. I’m a little scared, but I told Dad I would.”
Alba stared. “Dad’s dead, Bérénice.”
“I know. But I still talk to him. Don’t wear that face because I know you do too.”
Alba was looking at the pretty wooden heels on her white shoes as she scraped them across the dirt, making a two lane express road in her mind, one that could lead to anywhere at all. “Where do you have to go?”
Bérénice thought a moment, “All sorts of places. Some I know. Some I don’t think have even been made yet. Grandmother gave me these… a long time ago,” Bérénice reached into the lunch basket and brought out an old handkerchief, folded over something. She opened it up and Alba saw tiny little silver sticks. No - not sticks, she saw… they were tiny arrows.
“Grandma Artemis gave you those?”
“Yeah… she said these were special, and that it was my job to put them to good use one day. I’ve been thinking a lot about it lately.”
“What’re they for?” Alba asked, not liking the idea at all.
“They’re,” Bérénice’s face darkened, “They’re for the hunt. But not like the way Gram used hers. These are for the others. The wrong hunts. The ones that aren’t supposed to happen, that shouldn’t happen. The ones we’d take back if we could…”
“Do they hurt?”
“No… that’s the point. They don’t hurt - they’re just like Gram’s. She said to use them to help. Use them in the second breath, so they won’t feel the last. Use them to steal the quarry away”
“…And then what?”
“Then I take them home, to where they were supposed to go” she said, turning to smile at Alba.
They spent the afternoon together, talking around in circles while walking in the tall grass. Alba would almost forget their talk at times, and then be starkly reminded by a mention of the future, of teasing husbands or children or holidays. She said, quietly, during a lull in conversation, “You’re going to miss my birthday…” and then Alba started to cry quite uncontrollably.
“Hey… Hey I won’t be far.” Bérénice said, “And I’ll always write you letters. You can visit me on my island”
“Will it be big?” Alba asked, not quite reassured.
“Big? Why it’s going to be ENORMOUS!” she yelled, throwing her arms out to take in the whole of the countryside, “My house will be on a cliff, and it will be huge!” she yelled it out until the echoing came back and shook the window glazing around them. She told Alba about all of the animals she would keep for her to visit, whenever she wanted.
They said their goodbyes, finally, and Alba asked her where she was going first.
“South. I think I’ll be going south for a while,” she said sadly.
Alba taught herself how to drive on the way back home, to the detriment of one fender. The neighbors never saw Bérénice again, but if they wondered why they never seemed to bring it up around Alba or the family. Alba visited the houselands regularly, and always by herself. Sometimes at night she would see lights, soft and blue, move through the rooms just beyond the windows. There were less and less houses as time went by. People noticed in her pictures, and asked her why. “They got full. They floated away to someplace else,” was all she would tell them.
Alba would get letters every now and again. Some years kept Bérénice busier than others. Those were bad years. Alba got only a single letter during the war. It was from Poland. Bérénice only wrote, “I miss home.” …That was the entirety of the letter - one line.
When she was old, Alba would take vacations - always by herself - to an island somewhere. She would never say where. Friends never understood house shopping with her either. She would always demand upon looking in the attic before seeing anything else. In fact she would hardly ever look at anything else. She’d just go house by house until she came down from a particular attic of a particular house that looked just like all the others she’d looked at, smiling and saying, “Found it!"

Alba & Yinepu Have Grave Troubles

A third dog had come to live with Alba and the family, but he was mostly visible. Alba named him Yinepu, since she said he was a half border collie, half sokar mutt.

The thing was… whenever she took Yinepu for a walk, they would run into the restless dead. This wasn’t normally too bothersome, as Yinepu had an affinity for fetching their still beating hearts from their smoky, incorporal chests and then worrying them like a bone and smacking them on the pavement until the blood of their death was spent and splattered. Sometimes he’d growl.
Generally this had a positive effect, in that the spirits burst and swirled in the wind, sailing away like puffs of smoke carried off to “lands of forgotten sorrow,” as Alba would say. She also noted that it was good excercise for Yinepu, keeping him trim and fit. Restless Dead made his coat shine.
There was a hitch when they visited cemeteries though. Yinepu would get terribly distracted by all the commotion and had difficulty focusing on any one unclean spirit. When he and Alba went to visit the Manatham family tomb with the neighbor spinster ladies, Ethel and Lillian (they weren’t really sisters… no one talked about it. It was known and accepted) to leave an offering, Yin had one of his fits and Alba had to hold his neck until he calmed down. Alba was mighty cross, saying “So help me if I have to put down a restless corpse in my good saddle shoes…”
Lucky for everyone Lillian had a swell incantation that did the trick neatly.

Azeban Soksemo Among the Nereid

For months Alba had been telling everyone that a new dog had come to live with them. The family had grown used to her proclamations, and found it hard to argue the existence of another invisible dog, (especially since no one had been able to capture a photograph of it not existing), even if Alba said this one could run so fast as to fetch and return items before they'd even been thrown. Some friends (with cameras) still had their doubts, however.

One Sunday morning Alba got up early and walked out into the yard with nothing but an empty wash tub and some soapy water.
Neighbors heard her muttering, “I swear to Hatshepsut and a gaggle of Thutmose that I will scrub every bit of invisible off of this dog if it kills me….”
Later that afternoon several neighbors asked her when she had gotten a dog.

Cadejo's Persistent Existence

"Oh Jesus, Mary & Joseph! He's right here! Here! I mean are you even looking?"