We walk down the line of shops, a dark parade, leather and raven feathers, and I want the entire town to see us. I feel like I am telling Tempest where I belong. Not stuck in Coffee Gods with Courtney. Not in the high school, boxed into another set of classes. Not even in the cottage with Mom.

Lelia walks the white line of the highway, and I weave back and forth over it. A truck snakes into view and I jump back at the last second. Lelia laughs, rough and loud. Rush trails behind us, singing. A song that pulls from the deep greens of the mountains and grabs the sharp rays of sun and adds them to the percussion of our tramping feet. I don’t know if she’s singing because the day is so beautiful or if it makes the day so beautiful.

I wonder if that’s what magic is. Being so bound up with things that you can’t tell where they end and you start.

We open the door to the wood shop and the bells ring, a sharp cluster of sound. I stop. “Do that again,” I say, and Lelia flaps the door like a wing.

The bells ring. It takes Rush a second, but then she’s with me. Face turned up, eyes closed, taking in the sound. “Not quite the same,” she says, and hums the notes that she did the other day.

I run out of the wood shop, down the single row of stores, opening doors, flinging them wide. Looking up into the crevices of doorways for bells and measuring their notes against memory.

I run up the last porch, pounding three steps. This storefront is the old-fashioned kind that stands out much larger than the actual store behind it. It’s lined with wooden plaques that have been hand-marred by a knife. Postcards. Gifts. Wood carvings. Bone carvings. I pull the heavy wooden door.

Notes drift down like snow. Three notes, cold and cutting. I know that discord. The way they tangle.

“That’s it!” Rush says, running up behind me.

“That’s it,” I say, a pitch darker and a second behind.

The Bones: Now

The bones don’t remember who they used to be when they were all together. When they were glued with muscle and sunk deep under flesh. Now they are kept together by a wisp of spirit. It follows the bones like a shadow.

It doesn’t know where else to go.

“I hate this place,” says a voice as hard as the rain that came with death, washing everything clean.

“Why?” Another voice. From another place. It has a different way of threading words.

“It’s a tourist shop.” The first voice again. “There are tchotchkes here. And some of them are distinctly racist.”