Sophie slammed out of the grocery store, Chelsea’s humidity hitting her like a wall of water. She stood on the dusty corner, the crossroads. If she kept walking forward down Heard Street she would arrive at her house, where her mother slept, where Dr. Chen and her grandmother were possibly headed. Behind her, the homes and pavement fell away and there was dust, abandoned buildings, her grandfather in the form of a German Shepherd. The cross street was Maple. What if Sophie just took off? If she walked Maple in one direction it would take her beneath the looming green overpass that delivered cars to Boston. She would hit train tracks, vacant lots, an abandoned playground. She would come upon the shopping mall, almost all the stores inside closed, the ones still open strange boutiques, dollar stores selling shelves of toxic toilet cleaners next to rows of ceramic swans. Sophie was never allowed to go down Maple, because dead women had been found there. On the tracks, under the overpass, in a dumpster behind an industrial building. Sophie grew up hearing stories of the dead women; in her mind, they were solid landmarks, as present as the Tobin bridge, and as normal—surely most cities had bridges and playgrounds, shopping malls and dead women. Standing in front of Hennie’s, the air eerily still, she realized that it maybe wasn’t so. Maybe having so many dead women was particular to Chelsea.
In the other direction Maple was lined with the same shabby houses common to Chelsea. In the summertime they didn’t look too bad; most all of them had wide, leafy trees in their yards, or outside on the sidewalk, the muscled roots busting up the pavement. But if you looked beyond the canopy of green you would see how worn the homes were, the siding cracked, the stairs a hazard. Graffiti sprayed over doors and windows. Overgrown front lawns hid treasures of garbage. In the winter, with everything green receded and dead, the depressing face of Chelsea was undeniable. Maybe that was why Sophie liked summer best. That and no school, no mean nuns, no wearing the same ugly jumper every day, jumpers that began to smell a little by Wednesday, that absolutely held an odor by Friday, that hopefully would get washed over the weekend. At least that part of her life was over, Sophie realized. No more Catholic school. Hello, Chelsea High. The thought made her laugh out loud, breaking the strange quiet. She was supposed to go to high school after this?
The pigeons were stirring above her. Sophie realized they weren’t frozen by the stoppage of time; they were, like Sophie, somehow immune to it. There had to be another reason for their stillness. Could Sophie read a pigeon? She scanned them, huddled in a line on the wire, the way birds gather before a storm. Which pigeon would have the least disturbing interior? She selected Livia, and pushed her way inside the bird.
What it felt like to be so small! That struck Sophie first. She realized she perceived her own emotions as running the length of her body, and to feel such a fullness of feelings compacted inside the tiny body of a bird was new. Like a tightly wrapped bouquet as opposed to a sprawling garden of flowers. And Livia’s feelings were sweet, it was sweet to be Livia, her heart was so pure, so oriented toward rightness that she could relax and follow it, and she did, and there was little conflict inside her bird heart. There were many pulses of love, and Sophie could feel how the bird loved the sky, how she loved Arthur, delighted in his cranky rants, found them noble and adorable at once. Sophie felt a pulse of love for the wind, which Livia interacted with as a living thing with a will of its own, one that Livia had learned to understand and love. And there, a pulse of love for Sophie. Sophie felt joy at this, and shame. She didn’t know that she deserved it. Swarming the love was a sadness, a worry, a concern. A disappointment? Sophie didn’t want to feel that. She couldn’t feel sweet, pure-hearted Livia’s disappointment in her. She pulled herself out of the pigeon.
“I didn’t mean it!” she shouted up at the birds on their wire, and they shuffled and cooed, spoke in bird language, like they weren’t magical at all, or like Sophie was no longer special enough to hear their crystalline voices.
“Don’t talk about me in your bird languages when I’m standing right here!” Sophie hollered. “It’s rude! I can tell you’re talking about me!” She zoomed deeper into Livia and felt the bird’s concern rise above her disappointment. “If you’re so worried about me don’t talk about me behind my back when I’m right in front of you!” Sophie was crying now. She didn’t like the birds’ silence, she didn’t like the world when time was stopped. It felt wrong, the air heavy and still, nothing moving. Walking felt like pushing through soup. When would Hennie put everything back to normal?
“I don’t want to know who my father is!” Sophie screamed at the flock. “I like not having a father; it’s too weird to have one all of a sudden! I don’t want to know anything else about my family!”
Sophie remembered the secret she felt bobbing inside Angel, something about Andrea, her mother. She thought about the twin baby pictures in Hennie’s copper locket. Maybe for a moment she’d wanted to know more, but Sophie had changed her mind. She wanted Andrea to remain Andrea—cranky, overworked. As Andrea had tended to ignore her daughter, so had Sophie learned to tune out her mom. She didn’t want to tune in now, with so much sad, spooky information spinning around her. “I don’t want to know everything, okay?” she shouted. A dog howled at the sound of her voice, another animal able to move in the time-stop. Her grandfather.
Giddy lifted herself from the wire and flew down to Sophie’s hot shoulder. She fluttered and cooed, still smelling sweet from her bath.
“If I had a mouth I would give you a kiss,” she said. She brushed Sophie’s face with her wing. “Maybe you should apologize to Hennie.”
“I’ve been here forever. I have to go home.”
“Time’s stopped,” Arthur butted in. “No one’s even conscious right now but us and Hennie. And Kishka.” He shuddered, his feathers puffed up as if a wind had hit them.
“And my grandfather, the German Shepherd,” Sophie said. “I’m going home.” She turned on her heel and headed down Heard Street.
She passed the gang of boys who commonly terrorized her, frozen on a front porch. Their bicycles were heaped on the sidewalk, and it occurred to Sophie that she could just take one. It occurred to her that she could go right up to the biggest one, the bullyingest one, and give him a smack, a punch, a kick. He stood with one hand low on his hip, the other gesturing outward; he had been in the midst of a story when the zagavory hit. If she knocked him over would he retain his pose, like a department store mannequin?
Sophie walked up onto the porch. She slid between the boys—one half-bent in laughter, one leaning back against the wall, scratchy with peeling paint. Another had a cigarette stuck in the v of his fingers, burned down to the filter, a long ash arcing precariously. Sophie bumped his arm, shocked at the feel of his skin. The ash crumbled.
“What are you doing, Sophie?” Livia said. The bird sounded scared. “Leave the people alone.”
But it was mesmerizing to be here, in a lion’s den of sorts, and to be unafraid, safe for the moment, so close to the boys who bothered her. Not that Sophie could be sure that these were the boys who hounded her, trailed her on their bicycles, hollered names at her, suggested they would like to grab her and bring her to the train tracks, if only she wasn’t so ugly, such a dog, and how they barked as they menaced her, howling and bow-wowing, ruff-ruffing. Sophie kept her head down and so never really saw the boys as anything more than a pack, a cloud, a blur of striped athletic shirts, the silver spinning of bicycle wheels. This largest boy might not be the bully. Sophie tried to get a read on him, pushing into his space, but it was like static on a television set, no picture, no nothing. She placed her hand flat on the muscle of his arm. It was warm the way living people are warm. She brushed his hair out of his eyes. His hair was damp with humidity and sweat.
“Sophie,” Livia continued nervously. “Hennie could break the spell any minute. Then you’re here with all these boys, with a bunch of pigeons. Sophie, it would be terrible. Please, let’s go.”
Sophie imagined what would happen if the boys all came to with her standing there, twirling their hair. Partly it was hilarious, but also, horrifying. She stomped off the porch, extra hard, wondering if the stomp of her feet would jar them like sleeping people but of course it didn’t. “This is totally weird,” Sophie breathed. Her crying had stopped, her sadness distracted by the strange world she suddenly occupied.
THE STOPPING OF time didn’t really make Sophie’s house feel very different. Andrea slept in her darkened room, the shade drawn against the heat of the day, making the place a cave. Sophie thought she should get her mother more water, in case the time-stop stopped and she awoke extra thirsty in her fever. She moved toward her mother’s night table, reaching for the empty glass. Andrea started, rolling over in her bed, cracking her puffy eyes in alarm. Sophie screamed.
“What? What?” Andrea scrambled up in her bed, kicking sweaty sheets down her legs. “Oh my god, what? What are you doing? Why are you screaming?”
Sophie felt a bit of her mind flex, and the water glass was in her hand, broken. A crack had loosened a shard, and the shard lay in Sophie’s palm.
“The—the glass broke,” she said quickly, flooded with gratitude for her instinctive magic. Hennie was right, she could just do it. Sophie knew there was simple magic-mind tricks—and bigger magic that required stuff from her magic pouch and the howl of her zawolanie. How would she know the difference? She just would. It was part of her overall knowing.
“Oh my god, you scared me,” Andrea said. “Are you okay? Is there glass on the floor? Did you go to Goldstein’s?”
Sophie nodded, patting her purse.
“I have everything, juice, soup, all of it. The glass—it’s—I’m fine, it’s okay.” Why was Andrea awake? Because she was Kishka’s daughter. Because she was Sophie’s mother. Because somewhere inside her lay a dormant gene for magic, and it made her immune to the stoppage of time.
“Bring me some water,” Andrea said. “And throw that glass away. And make yourself some soup or something. I’m not going to be able to cook for you tonight.” Andrea collapsed back onto her pillows before Sophie could say something smart about tonight being just like any other night. Why did she have to be so mean to her mom? Was it a piece of Kishka’s cruel magic inside her? She bent low and gave her mom a kiss on her sweaty forehead. Andrea batted her away.
“Are you crazy?” she asked groggily. “Do you want to get yourself sick?”
* * *
WITH HER MOM conked out on cold medicine, Sophie rummaged half-heartedly through the fridge. There wasn’t much to eat, but she wasn’t really hungry. She was distracted, bunched up inside. What was she supposed to do now? Where were the pigeons? Sophie moved to the kitchen window and spotted them huddling and cooing by their bowls of water. And what else she saw sent goosebumps rising up her arms like a mountain range: Laurie LeClair, standing in her backyard. Like a skull-faced ghost with her pale skin, black-rimmed eyes, and flat white hair. She looked into the window, staring into Sophie’s face with her blank and hollow gaze. “Laurie?” Sophie stuttered.
“What?” Andrea mumbled from her bedroom.
“Nothing, Ma!” Sophie yelled back, not taking her eyes off Laurie’s, empty and haunted at once. She wore black jeans, tight on her skinny legs, and black sneakers, and a black t-shirt revealing long white arms spotted with bruises. Her child was with her, a toddler with amber curls, in wrinkly shorts and a t-shirt. One hand clutched Laurie’s, the other held a plastic shovel. When Laurie let go and moved toward Sophie the child’s hand stayed raised, her fingers curled in an empty grip. The child had been stunned by the time-stop, but not Laurie. Laurie glanced at the baby, made sure she was stable, and walked stiffly across the yard. The pigeons parted to accommodate her, and Sophie ran from her kitchen, dashing out the back door to intercept her.
“Laurie, Laurie, Laurie,” Sophie gasped, putting her arms in front of her, touching the girl’s shoulders. “How are you awake? Time is stopped. Are you magic, too?”
Sophie stared deep into Laurie’s dead eyes. The only magic she could possibly have was the unnatural reanimation of a zombie. Sophie glanced over at the child, posed like a doll at the back of the yard. She looked like one of the lawn ornaments cluttering the yard of the woman up the street. She should be holding a lantern, not a toy shovel, or wearing a pointed red hat like a gnome.
Laurie’s chapped mouth cracked open to speak. When Laurie spoke Sophie didn’t only hear the words, she felt them, and the feeling was bad. “I am the Dola,” Laurie spoke. There was a life in her eyes, a strange flicker. “I am not Laurie right now.”
Sophie wished the thing would never talk again. Every word seared into her, leaving in its wake a regret that seeped into her bones. Oh no, Sophie thought, and the phrase began a loop she was powerless to stop. Oh no, oh no, oh no, oh no.
“Come here, let’s talk back here.” Sophie pulled Laurie back to the rear of the yard, where the pigeons had assembled themselves around the baby. “Will you guys make some noise?” she requested, and a choir of cooing started up. “Thank you.” Sophie looked at the little girl, her steady breathing, her rigid pose. The sun blasted down on her. “She’s going to get a sunburn,” Sophie said, worried.
“You can move her,” said the Dola.
Sophie lifted the girl under his arms. She was light and smelled like a baby, sort of sour. She was grimy, her hair full of dust, her clothing limp from being worn and re-worn. It was strange, placing her down in the shade like a statue. She wobbled, but stayed upright. “How old is she?” Sophie asked.
The Dola considered, reaching backward into Laurie’s consciousness. “Almost two.” Sophie nodded. She leaned her back against the chainlink fence, which sagged gently like a hammock beneath her weight. The Dola stood stiff before her, watching her with Laurie’s face.
“Why are you Laurie LeClair?” Sophie asked.
“She was easy to get into,” the Dola said. “She takes drugs, it makes it very simple to slip in. She doesn’t really know herself, so she doesn’t know if an entity takes over. She just thinks it’s the drugs.”
This made Sophie feel bad, and it wasn’t just the Dola’s voice spurring doom and gloom inside her body. The Dola was a creep. “That seems… unethical,” Sophie said in a smart voice.
“There is no such thing as ethics,” the Dola said. “There is only destiny, and much of it is bad. Nonetheless, it is such, it is destiny. It is the rule, and it must be obeyed.” The Dola turned her face to the sun. “The destiny of every person is inside me,” she said, her scary eyes closed. “I feel it. When it goes off track I feel that, too. You have gone off track.”
“I have?” Sophie didn’t want to talk about herself, she was fully sick of thinking about herself. She would rather engage the Dola in existential debates that made her feel smart. “Isn’t it my destiny then, to get off track with my destiny?”
The Dola opened her eyes and rolled them. “Yes. It is your destiny to have done this. And it is my destiny to come here and bring you back to your destiny.”
“You want me to go back to Hennie’s, don’t you?” Sophie sulked, fighting back a rain of tears. Every time the Dola spoke it was an injury upon her heart. The muscle grew heavier with every word, a solid rock in her chest.
“Yes.” The Dola nodded Laurie LeClair’s head. “You were meant to learn more from that woman. You need to go back to her.”
“Is she ever going to put time back on?” Sophie whined. “Is she waiting for me to come back or something?”
The Dola shrugged. “I don’t know, time doesn’t have a destiny. It’s time. I know nothing about it.”
“And if I don’t go back to Hennie’s what happens? You keep hanging around?”
The Dola nodded. “Yes. I will be around you always.”
“That’s going to be really weird,” Sophie pouted. “It’s going to be really weird to have Laurie LeClair just hanging around all the time. Especially when the time spell is broken and that baby starts crying.” They both turned back to look at the frozen child. A fly had landed on her cheek. Were flies magic? How come they got to buzz around? “Livia, will you make sure bugs aren’t crawling on that baby?”
“Oh, of course.” Livia set about to brushing the baby off with her feathers, cooing all the while.
“If you’re just hanging around like Laurie LeClair,” Sophie continued, “being creepy, people are going to call the cops or something. Or someone who knows Laurie will take her to the hospital. Then what are you gonna do?”
“Then I jump into another’s body,” the Dola said, simply.
“Really.”
“Oh, yes. It can go on for all eternity. If I am forced to leave Laurie, I am thinking I will occupy your mother.”
“No!” Sophie cried.
“Yes. She is very weakened; she would be easy to slip into.”
“You are really evil,” Sophie spat. “I don’t know how you can live with yourself.”
“It helps that there is no such thing as evil,” the Dola said. “If I believed in it, I would probably have a hard time.”
“I thought there was evil,” Sophie said. “I thought my grandmother was evil.”
“The concept of evil serves its purpose for humans,” the Dola granted. “But where I exist, there is no such thing. There is only destiny.”
“Well, I wish you would go back there,” Sophie grumbled.
“If you return to your destiny, I will,” the Dola said. “I would love a day off. I was haunting Laurie in the form of her drug dealer earlier this week. She was going to let that child die, and that is not their destiny. After she’d salted her, she was meant to bring her to the hospital, and instead she did her drugs and fell into a stupor. I was very concerned she wouldn’t respond to my haunting, and that the child would die.”
“And then what?” Sophie asked. “You’d haunt her forever?”
“No, the child would,” the Dola explained. “She would become a Naw, a spirit cast out of their bodies against their destiny. It would have been tragic for everyone. Naws are eternally unhappy, and Laurie would have been driven mad. So, good work last week. Now this week, I have you.”
Inside her home, Sophie checked in on her sleeping mom. Andrea snored a light snore, undisturbed by the drama in the backyard. Satisfied, Sophie made a cup of instant soup and sat at her kitchen table eating it, having a staring contest with the Dola out the window. As the sun slid across the sky, Sophie periodically returned to the yard to move the little girl into a shady place. “This is crazy,” Sophie said.
“Yes,” the Dola agreed.
Sophie went back into her house and grabbed her magic pouch from her mother’s purse and returned to the yard. The Dola watched her, solemnly. Occasionally the being said, “You should return to Hennie,” and the words ran down Sophie’s spine, pure guilt. She ignored it.
Sophie stuffed her hand into the pouch. How was she supposed to know what grainy grain or sharp rock or smooth rock or sandy sand or pigeon bone was the magic ingredient she needed? She let her hand hang open inside the bag, and felt it pulled toward something. The grainy bits. She harvested them from the bag, felt the pile of it cool and heavy in her hand. Did she need fire? Hennie had used fire. Andrea didn’t smoke, there were never any matches around. Supposedly Sophie was able to just make things with her mind; surely fire, so elemental, would be simple. And it was. A tuft of flames ignited on a patch of dirt in her backyard. Sophie quickly yanked a few dry sprouts of weeds that hung too close. She took a breath. The pigeons stirred.
If Sophie was as powerful as everyone was acting, she should be able to do—or undo—any zagavory Hennie could do. She found the piece of herself that was her zawolanie and flexed it, let the perfect sound fly from her lips. She hurled the grainy grains into the fire, extinguishing it. A glass bowl holding water for the pigeons cracked, wetting the dirt. Sophie heard the snap of her mother’s water glass breaking on her nightstand inside the house. Laurie LeClair’s baby burst into tears, flapping its arms against itself like a grounded bird. The pigeon’s coos became alarmed as they dodged blind baby-stomps. She screamed and howled, waving her plastic shovel. The Dola turned to her with an annoyed sigh.
“Sophie!” Sophie could hear her mother shouting for her inside the house. The crazy racket, the strange electrical surge of time reactivated, had awoken her. The baby continued to cry. The Dola stared at it blankly.
“It’s a baby,” Sophie snapped at her. “Just be sweet to it. Do Dolas have, like, no maternal instinct?”
“No, we don’t,” the Dola said. “I actually don’t even know what you mean by maternal instinct. That’s a human thing. I’m more of a concept.” She walked to the baby and petted its head awkwardly. The child looked up at her mother and, not finding her, screamed louder.
“Sophie!” Andrea’s head poked out the kitchen window, then was gone. Soon she was on the back porch, her puffy, sickly eyes widening at what she saw. Andrea’s head teetered back and forth between her daughter and Laurie LeClair, with an occasional dip to take in Laurie LeClair’s screaming baby. The pigeons, Sophie noted, had flown away. Time was running smoothly. Her zagavory had worked. She’d kept control of her zawolanie, and it had done less damage. Sophie would have liked to bask in this victory, but the ruckus in her backyard prevented it.
“I’m sorry—Laurie? Laurie LeClair?”
The Dola looked at Andrea blankly.
“Can’t you just play along?” Sophie hissed. “Act normal?”
“I don’t care about the consequences you will face in your life as a result of not following your destiny,” the Dola said. “As far as I’m concerned, the more problems for you, the better.” The Dola fixed its steely, empty stare on Andrea, who shuddered.
“Sophie, what is going on? What is she doing here?”
“Uh, I was out in the yard, and she passed by and we just started talking,” Sophie said dumbly. She could see her mother deciding whether to believe her. “I’m so bored with being grounded!” She affected a whine. “I just wanted someone to hang out with!”
“Really?” Andrea raised an eyebrow. “Laurie LeClair?” The baby continued to howl. Laurie stood motionless beside it, unaffected. “What are you on?” Andrea demanded of the girl. “Huh? What’s wrong with your baby? Will you—do something, will you hold it or something? Sophie, really, what is going on!”
“I don’t know!” Sophie sulked. The only strategy she could muster was embodying a bratty teenaged girl, which she supposed she was. “We were hanging out and she got weird!”
“Well, she’s on drugs,” Andrea informed her daughter. It was extra easy to talk about Laurie like she wasn’t there, because she wasn’t. But when Andrea told the girl to take her baby and leave, the Dola responded.
“No,” she said.
“No?” Andrea repeated, shocked.
“No. I’m not leaving your yard.”
“You’ll do what I say or else I’ll call the police. And Child Services. I think I’ll be calling them, regardless.”
The Dola shrugged. “I don’t care,” it said. “Do what you want.”
“Sophie!” Andrea turned her agitation toward what she could control, her daughter. “Make her leave!”
“Sophie can’t make me do anything,” the Dola said in its simple, honest voice. There was a bit of weariness to it. Sophie had to strain to hear what the Dola sounded like beneath the waves of dread and regret the voice provoked. The Dola didn’t sound sad exactly, just resigned. It must be wearisome to walk around all your life telling people simple truths they didn’t want to hear.
“I’m calling the police.” Andrea turned and stormed back into the house.
“If I am taken away, I’ll jump into her.” The Dola nodded at the back door. There was no threat in its voice, just the calm reportage of facts.
“Really?” Sophie asked. “So we’ll be having this conversation, this same one, but you’ll be in my house with me, you’ll be my mother.”
“That’s right.”
Not only was that horrible for all the obvious reasons, but the thought of seeing her mother all zombified, blank and flat, her self gone away, replaced with the monotonous Dola, gave Sophie terrible shivers.
“Oh, god, okay!” Sophie spat. “Ugh! I really hate you.”
The Dola shrugged. “People tell me that all the time, but I don’t know what it feels like.” Beside it, Laurie LeClair’s baby howled and screamed, whacking itself in the head with its shovel.
Inside the house, Andrea waited for the staticky telephone to connect her with the police department. With all the windows opened to the summer day, Laurie LeClair remained in full view. “Hello?” Andrea spoke into the phone.
Please, please, please, please, Sophie chanted in her mind. Her hand stuffed in her pouch, her fist wrapped around a cool, jagged hunk of crystal. She willed the phone to die, pushing her energy into the piece of black plastic. It exploded in Andrea’s hand.
“Shit!” Sophie jumped.
Andrea turned to her, staring at her empty palm where the phone once was. The thing lay in shards around her bare feet, the edges of the shards melted. “Why are you swearing!” Andrea scolded her daughter. “I don’t understand what is happening. Sophie, is something happening?” Andrea sounded desperate, and scared. She touched her head. “I think I may still have my fever…”
“Ma, the heat wave is causing all these blackouts and stuff,” Sophie lied. “We’re not really supposed to be using electricity if we can help it.” She wrapped her hand around Andrea’s arm and made to guide her mother back toward the bedroom.
“Uh, uh, uh.” Andrea shook her head. “I’m not going anywhere until that druggie is out of the yard.” They both turned to look at Laurie LeClair, motionless as a sundial, aimed at them. Andrea shuddered. “Do you see?” she hissed at Sophie. “Do you see what drugs will do to you?” It was truer than Andrea even knew. If it wasn’t for drugs Laurie wouldn’t have brought the Dola. Sophie imagined one of those antidrug commercials she’d seen on television—Laurie LeClair, all zombied out, possessed by a conceptual being. This is your brain on drugs, inhabited by a Dola.
“Ma, please let me handle it,” Sophie said softly. She knew tone would be everything right now. Energy was contagious. If Sophie was all ruffled, Andrea would continue to be, and it would turn into a fight between them. The vibe was volatile, charged with the eyes of the Dola upon them. Sophie rounded her voice with compassion, and weighted it with maturity. “Let me walk her to her home, okay? Please don’t call the cops.”
“Well, I can’t now,” Andrea spat, kicking at a piece of phone with her foot, a battery melted to a chunk of plastic, bright, thin wires wrapped around it. “I can’t believe we need a new phone. Sophie, you are not going to that girl’s house!” Andrea’s hands clutched at her hair, close to the scalp, a habit of hers when she was overwhelmed. Sophie could detect a low, painful sound. It made the house feel tragic around them. She looked out the window and saw the Dola’s mouth moving, very slight, very quiet, almost soundless. The baby smacked her hands to her ears and wailed. Andrea pressed her thumb to the place between her eyes. “Oh, my head,” she moaned. “And that baby. It’s so wrong. The cops would actually get her help, Sophie. That baby shouldn’t be with a mother like that, she’s already tried to kill it, I don’t understand how she’s even on the streets.”
Sophie stuck her hand in her pouch, watching her mother watching Laurie LeClair, shaking her head, her lower lip bunched in her teeth. She slid her hand into her magic bag. The finest stuff, like a powder. Sophie knew what she needed, like the elements were bits of her own self. She pulled a pinch into her palm, and removed her hand. She pulled her zawolanie up inside her, but calmer, smaller. She didn’t need the full strength of it, she was understanding. Sometimes a whisper would do the trick. Or a sneeze. She fake-sneezed her zawolanie into the palm of her hand, surprising Andrea with the sound. Andrea looked up and got a palmful of magic dust sneezed into her face. Sophie’s mother’s eyes grew heavy, she strained to keep them open, and as she tumbled to the floor Sophie saw them cross, rolling in her head like marbles.