No one noticed the switch, and the girls, who believed they knew their homes well, discovered new things that astonished them as they came to recognize them in a new way, compared to the stories they had told each other every day through the fence.

But the guardian angels were always having a siesta when the girls were together and went on ignorant of everything.

It was a hot day, at the beginning of autumn. The sky was black, and gray clouds heavy as lead hovered near the ground. It was the hour when the girls normally met at the fence, but neither had arrived.

It was hard to breathe that afternoon in the small tin house; the grandfather and three granddaughters walked barefoot in the river, getting some fresh air. The ten-year-old girl remembered that, as always, her friend would be waiting for her in the big house’s garden. The hour had already passed, but it didn’t matter, she would go anyway. She saw a bare-backed white horse, fed it a handful of grass, climbed up, and took off galloping, whipping it with a chinaberry branch. The storm was approaching, and the trees were rocking big swings back and forth in the wind; filaments of electricity, like those in light bulbs found in only the richest houses, filled the sky. One thunderclap, then another, broke the silence of the afternoon. The guardian angel was awake, but, as he was used to the girl always making it through the storms without catching cold, he only took care to protect her from the lightning. “White horses attract lightning,” the angel was thinking. “You must be careful. You must be careful.”

The two girls met at the fence and barely had time to say goodbye: it was pouring so hard that the rain formed a thick curtain between them, impossible to push aside.

From very far away the galloping of the horse could be heard in the storm, and then a bolt of lightning and then another inflicted deep wounds, gashes of fire.

The girl got off the horse and sank to the ground in a faint at the doorway to the tin house. The river was rising nearby, and suddenly she heard lightning strike the animal that lurched forward neighing, with its mane standing on end, then lay still on the dark muddy ground. In the garden another lightning bolt struck the other girl, while the angel was busy protecting her from the cold, thinking that the house had had lightning rods since time immemorial.

The birds and the streams were full of song the next morning when the two girls, riding on the white horse, reached heaven. There were no big houses or small houses, no tin or brick ones: heaven was a big blue room with fields of raspberries and other fruits. The two girls rose higher and higher into the sky, until they could no longer be seen.

The Acrobats

They lived in dark, chilly corridors where drafts of air blew in from the plant-filled courtyards. They had the souls of acrobats, playing under the archways of the building’s chain of courtyards. They didn’t feel that desperate passion that all children feel for throwing stones and finding light-blue magpie eggs in trees. The deaf woman who did the ironing, who seemed as if she might break the ironing table with her heavy strokes, called them Cipriano and Valerio without being able to hear them. Cipriano and Valerio were her sons, and they grew less and less familiar to her. They had come up with secret plans that came from a storybook about acrobats, given to them by the owners of the house.