Jack pulled out the bottle. Its contents glittered and shifted like dust. Gold dust. Water would be more use. He wondered how long it would take him to walk home. If it was gold, maybe they could settle near town. Live in a real house, like his grandparents, although theirs was in Woodwild, practically a ghost town. Like Uncle Davy, although his was the old Spicer place.

Jack opened the bottle.

It wasn’t gold. It rose, glittering like bubbles in lemonade. Up into the thin bars of evening sun, slow and deliberate. Jack clapped his hand over the bottle; instantly, the stuff puffed up like flour. It scratched in his throat and lungs and brain.

When he stopped sneezing, the air was clear except for the haze of dusk. A little dust remained in the bottle. Jack screwed the lid back and put the bottle in his pocket. He did not feel sick, but he heard the drumming again: his heart thundering, the blood in his ears like marching feet and, along his spine, a certainty of deep, cold darkness under the earth. He spun around. Nothing but trees and, nearby, the sawmill. Night hurried through the pines.

Limping on, Jack tried to think of anything but darkness. Instead, he thought of the glittering dust, the prickling in the back of his mind. Of gold and the wishes it would have made come true. Of the books his mum brought home from the library, the stories his grandmother told, strange bottles and wishes.

“I wish,” he began. Something, startled, crashed through the trees.

“I wish,” he said loudly, “that we had a real house. With bookcases for Mum,” he amended quickly. Jack’s uncle had a fancy old bookcase that locked, full of outdated almanacs, Reader’s Digest Condensed Books and older volumes turned backs-to-the-wall with marbling on the edges of their pages. Library books, wrapped in plastic fastened with yellowing sticky-tape, smelled peculiar.

The sky was gold, then pink, then pale as new wood, but among the trees night already curled around him like smoke. Jack walked as loudly as he could, missing one boot, to frighten off anything in the shadows. He was twelve, and small as he was, there wasn’t anything bigger than him in the trees that hadn’t been brought from England. But his grandmother told him terrible things and his mum had read him The Hound of the Baskervilles once; he’d never been entirely comfortable with the night since, especially when he heard—he paused on one foot to pick bindies from the bare one and listened. Nothing howled. Nothing at all.

“I wish!” he said loudly, and paused. He was going to say, I wish my friends were here, but he didn’t have many. The bottle might fix that. So would having a real house. So he wished for friends, mumbling it in case something in the trees laughed at him, or his uncle, waiting nearby, heard.