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kitchen towel and call Sissy in for lunch. Maybe, Sissy reasons, even Vicki Anderson will find her way home, though this is something she throws in begrudgingly to assuage a lingering tie in her heart that comes from once being friends, from those long days together, from the many sleepovers where the girls transformed an entire room into a pile of blankets and then scurried underneath them like moles. She can still see Vicki’s face, her dark eyes illuminated by a flashlight, the shadow under her chin. Vicki asked, “What do you want to be when you grow up?”
    “I don’t know,” Sissy confessed. It seemed pointless to plan her life when her desires changed from day to day.
    “Well,” Vicki Anderson told her. “If you don’t have ambition, that’s not my problem. I’m going to join the circus. Or ride on trains. Or dissect a heart. Or be a famous ghost detective and end up on TV. Watch, and you’ll see my name around.”
    “Anything is possible,” Sissy said, shrugging.
    And today, with the light spilling over her, everything does seem possible if she stays up here, away from the ground.
    “I’ve got another story for you,” Eva yells. “A doozy about a sister who kicks her younger sister’s ass.”
    “Quiet!” Sissy says, daring, arms raised. She doesn’t need Eva’s stories; she has her own. Tucked beneath her bed is a shoe box that containsher favorites—Nancy Drew and
Ringling Brothers
and
Circus on Rails
and
Ghost Detectives.
Also in the box she keeps a stolen photograph, yellowed at its scalloped edges, of her mother as a young girl— Natalia with Frank, her head tilted back, a dark dress with a bow around her waist, a daring V-neck. Under that lies a diary filled with secrets and stories—stories that avenge Precious and murder Vicki Anderson five times over. Stories of old women with gnarled fingers and broken teeth. Stories of birds in the night, their iridescent eyes watching everything. Stories of Eva, who Sissy often refers to as Darth Vader, the Evil Overlord. Stories of her mother, to which Sissy has added fantastic twists: instead of leaving, her mother grew white wings and flew away. Instead of not saying goodbye, her mother sent many regretful letters, pages damp from tears. In one tale, Sissy even made a knife tear at her mother’s flesh, but after she penned those lines, she immediately regretted them and blackened out the entire passage with a marker.
    A sullen ache settles in her, and she misses what is gone. She flails her arms forward before catching her balance. Her pulse races. To soothe herself, she begins a familiar refrain:
Once upon a time.
Once upon a time, she tells herself, there was a girl perched five thousand feet in the air on a pool top, the daughter of a woman who danced around fires in a country with no name. Sissy strains to complete the story. She does not remember all her mother’s words spoken before bedtime and will, in fact, never remember them entirely—those tales of lost women, wanderers; those who disappeared in ash and dust and were forgotten; a woman left on a street corner, peddling trinkets and reading palms; bits of the stories told in fragments of other languages.
My real mother threatened to sell me once because I didn’t listen,
Natalia once said in a bedtime story.
She could be a real Kurva who shape-shifted like an animal.
    Sissy remembers to breathe. She adjusts, readies herself. She begins a turn. She hears crunching leaves, smells almonds and coconut butter. Then, a yank. Her legs wobble and strain, pulled by gravity, and then, she alights—flesh and bone hitting the ground.
    Eva stands above her with a look that says it all: She will brook no foolishness. “Queen of the morons,” she says sharply. “I told you to get down and work.”
    Sissy rises and brushes pebbles and dirt from her knees. She wipes away blood and rubs a welt that is already forming. The moment is ruined, the day is ruined. Nothing will change. She will only be