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Like a normal man he considered himself an excellent driver even though he never paid attention to what he was doing—he could have hit someone. Miss Vicks always paid attention; she paid attention to everything. She knew there hadn’t been any reeds here before, but now the bed seemed to be growing, spreading out on either side and the pond also to be getting bigger, more like a lake, its far shore no longer visible and its surface troubled by large gray-green foam-crested waves. Meanwhile the reeds seemed to be getting taller as she stood there, the long blackish pipes of their stems pushing up taller and taller around her, whistling in the wind, their feathery heads breaking apart in her face, releasing clouds of fluffy seeds that got into her eyes and ears and nostrils, and made it increasingly difficult for her to see or hear or breathe.
    Her dog was whimpering now as he lay on the ground among the reeds, his soft red coat completely hidden under a shifting blanket of down. Coming to meet her lover Miss Vicks had often had this sense of thwarted will, like when a large insect flies mistakenly into a room through an open window and then keeps flying around and around, attracted to all the wrong things, mirrors or framed photographs, heat registers or—sadder still—a closed window, without ever realizing that all it needs to do is go out the window it came in through and it will be guaranteed a blue sky and a fresh breeze and the prospect of a life that won’t be cut short by the angry swat of a rolled newspaper.
    “Get up!” she said. The sun was bright red and more ball-like than usual, falling into the place behind the reeds where there used to be a pond. She pushed the stems aside, furious. “Get up!” she said again, as upset by the way she was talking to her dog—her sweet little dog who never did anyone any harm—as she was by everything else. “What am I doing here?” Miss Vicks wondered aloud. “Whose life is this?”
    All at once she could see the blue rowboat approaching across the wild gray-green water, its bow rising and falling in the swells.
    At first she heard nothing but the plash of the oars, followed by voices, a boy’s and a girl’s.
    “Then what?” the boy was saying. It was hard to hear his voice but Miss Vicks knew it was Eddie—she could barely make out his features in the gathering darkness, his white teeth and thick dark hair.
    “Then you’re going to have to give it to him, like you promised,” the girl said. “Before he has to come after it him-self.” Fireflies were alighting in a row upon the yellow coil of her hair, after which they turned to diamonds.
    “What if I change my mind?” Eddie asked.
    “Don’t make jokes,” the girl replied. “I’ll be watching.”
    “I’m not making a joke,” Eddie said.
    Miss Vicks couldn’t hear the rest. Her dog started to bark and Eddie’s voice broke apart into static. Night had fallen; the girl made herself very small and flew into his pocket. A few stars were twinkling around the quarter moon.

Prom Dress
    I WISH THIS WAS A DIFFERENT STORY. THE VESSELS sailed and sailed and eventually they fell off the edge. You can have all the information in the world and what good does it do you? The edge of the world is a real place; when you have no soul there are no limits. There was a game everyone used to play at birthday parties called musical chairs. A parent would put a record on the record player and cheerful music would start up, disguising the fact that someone was about to be cast into the outer dark where the fairies live.
    Eddie returned to school as if nothing had happened and Miss Vicks acted as if he had never been gone, withholding the favors she usually granted sick students like clapping the erasers or feeding the goldfish. She knew it wasn’t Eddie though, that the thing sitting in Eddie’s seat wasn’t the same Eddie who’d been sitting there before. She couldn’t take out a measuring tape and measure him