“It’s dark now and the fireflies sing but they don’t come down they don’t come down to where I am, where I’ve been and what I can see if I close. I closed at the daylight, only one kind of flower, and my whole heart sang, but he’s gone now,” she whispered, staring at her fingertips in consternation, as though the answer might be written along the whorls of her fingerprints.
She sat on the floor of the closet, tying and untying shoes that weren’t on her feet, relacing them again and again. “They have to be the right shoes, otherwise they won’t be there when he needs them. When he needs me,” she muttered quietly to herself, opening and closing her starry eyes in a way that was less like blinking and more like the awake/asleep of an old porcelain doll picked up/put down over and over.
“It’s funny all the things you remember,” she told herself. “Because they haven’t happened yet. It’s still breakfast time, and the white feather is in her hand, and the cup on the ground is broken. Everyone’s medallion is tarnishing for lack of use, because they don’t even have them yet. Did you know she had a plan for everyone to have theirs? She did,” she said, and then chewed her lower lip, thinking back over the statement.
“She introduced him and blushed while she spoke because she knew she was doing it wrong,” she said, fingers pulling the loops undone yet again. “I can hear them singing. Only in my right ear,” she murmured, reaching up to run a finger around the rim of the shell of her ear, then splay her fingers through her hair, and twist the curls.