We moved that Spring. The new house was far from town, surrounded by forest and quarries. In June we watched the squirrels in the trees and ravens in the skies, and the pink and red and purple flowers in the clearings, and the fishbones and lichen at the bottoms of the quarries. In July we sat in the cool forest; we sunbathed on the quarries; we played Sticks and looked at the clouds; we imagined dancing in a palace made from the sun.
There was a table in the forest where we went to buy rice. That was all we ate until the table disappeared, and then we ate nothing.
That August the air became too hot and we stayed in the house. We watched the forest through the window, but the squirrels had died and the ravens had flown north, so instead we played I Spy with the different colors on the trees. We drank tea made from pine needles; we pretended the house’s ceiling was blue and the lights were clouds; we kept imagining the palace.
There was a fire in the forest. We watched it dance for weeks, sweeping up the trees and turning the sky black. We thought we saw the palace in the flames. There were ballrooms with cream-colored curtains and libraries with huge windows and fountains with mermaids, and gardens heavy with fruit and flowers and strange new animals, and mazes and thrones and kitchens and sprawling fields of grass. We saw children dancing in the palace. We danced too.
