the glass, slowly swept its beam along the interior, and when it neared, the girls leapt to their feet, slipped
on the puddles of peas and carrots, and sent the jars spinning and clattering across the linoleum. The
front door opened, and two policemen stepped inside. One of the men said to the other, "This is where
he said they would be." Onions shouted for them to run, but Kivi and Blomma did not move. They stood
side by side in the middle of the baby food aisle, joined hands, and waited for the men to come and get
them.
"I don't know why," Onions said. "It was the most horrible thing I have ever seen. I circled around
behind the men and could see Kivi and Blomma when the lights hit them right in the face. They looked as
if they were waiting for it to happen. The policeman said, 'He was right. There is someone here.' And the
other said, 'Freeze.' Kivi squeezed her eyes shut, and Blomma raised one hand to her forehead, but they
didn't look afraid at all. Like they were happy, almost."
Onions wriggled through the door and escaped, not bothering with the stolen goods. Instinct set in,
and she ran through the empty streets, heedless of all traffic, never looking back. The fog disoriented her,
and she ran all the way through town to the other side. Once she had found a hiding place in a yellow
barn, she waited nearly all day to return home, taking a route that skirted the streets. When Ragno and
Zanzara found her, she was exhausted.
"Why did the man say that?" Béka asked her. "What did he mean, 'This is where he said they
would be'?"
"Somebody must have told the policemen where we were." Onions shuddered. "Somebody who
knows our ways."
Béka took her by the hands and lifted her up from the ground. "Who else could it be?" He was
looking straight at me, as if accusing me of a heinous crime.
"But I didn't tell—"
"Not you, Aniday," he spat out. "The one who took your place."
"Chopin," said Chavisory, and one or two laughed at the name before catching their emotions. We
trudged home in silence, remembering our miss-ing friends Kivi and Blomma. Each of us found a private
way to grieve. We took their dolls out of the hole and buried them in a single grave. Smaolach and
Luchóg spent two weeks building a cairn, while Chavisory and Speck divided our departed friends'
possessions among the nine of us left behind. Only Ragno and Zanzara remained stoic and impassive,
accepting their share of clothing and shoes but saying next to nothing. Through that summer and into the
fall, our conversations revolved around finding meaning in the girls' surrender. Onions did her best to
convince us that a betrayal had occurred, and Béka joined in, affirming the conspiracy, arguing that the
humans were out to get us and that it was only a matter of time before Kivi and Blomma would fully
confess. The men in the black suits would return, the army men, the police and their dogs, and they
would hunt us down. Others among us took a more thoughtful view.
Luchóg said, "They wanted to leave, and it was only a matter of time. I only hope that the poor
things find home in the world and weren't sent off to live in a zoo or put under the microscope by a mad
scientist."
We never heard of them again. Vanished, as if an airy nothing.
More than ever, Béka insisted we live in darkness, but he did allow us nights away from the
diminished clan. When the chance arose over those next few years, Speck and I would steal away to
sleep in relative peace and luxury beneath the library. We threw ourselves into our books and papers.
We read the Greeks in translation, Clytemnestra in her grief, Antigone's honor in a thin coating of earth.
Grendel prowling the bleak Danish night. The pilgrims of Canterbury and lives on the road. Maxims of
Pope, the rich clot of human-ity in all of Shakespeare, Milton's angels and aurochs, Gulliver big, little,
yahoo. Wild ecstasies of Keats. Shelley's Frankenstein. Rip Van Winkle sleeping it off. Speck insisted
on Austen, Eliot, Emerson, Thoreau, the Brontes, Alcott, Nesbitt, Rossetti, both Brownings, and
especially Alice down the rabbit hole. We worked our way right up to the present age, chewing through
the books like a pair of silverfish.
Sometimes, Speck would read aloud to me. I would hand her a story she had never before seen,
and almost without a beat, she made it hers. She fright-ened me from the word Once in Poe's "The
Raven." She brought me to tears over Ben Jonson's drowned cat. She made the hooves thunder in "The
Charge of the Light Brigade" and the waves roar in Tennyson's "Ulysses." I loved the music of her voice
and watching her face as she read, season after season. In the summertime her bared skin darkened, and