And for a second I could see by the wild look in her eye that as muddled as I had made this, she got it. She got it. We were not separate from it all, writing about it, sculpting it, in that moment we felt it differently; we were it, and it didn’t take mermaids or UFOs or ghosts to remind us of the wonder of it. Why we couldn’t feel this all the time I didn’t know, but in that moment we did.

And in that moment we were not just ourselves, we had given up ourselves and because we felt it not just in ourselves, we were part of everything, the wind and the rain, the moonflowers and the moon, each other and Miss Macy and the soldiers manning the guns on the shore, the submarines and their captain and all of the crew, the grandmother whale and the baby, the elephant seal with its last gasping breath pushed back to the waves, the hermit and his mermaid, the UFO, the tide and the rain and the fog and the bats and the bugs, we were the pigs and the cows and the chickens and Flying Bob and the men looking for him and Crying Alice and the ghost, and we were the ones watching the parachuted figures, we were all that the parachuted figures saw, and we were the parachuted figures drifting gently in the stars.

And I got the rocker from downstairs and put it back next to Sina’s, and we rocked side by side. And I held Sina’s hand. And pretty soon Old Tom came in, got a chair, and sat next to us, which was unprecedented, and night fell and the first evening star appeared and the windows were open and the scent of the night stock wafted up to us from the night garden.

Many thanks to:

Many thanks to:

Ian Andersen

Marie Campbell

Margaret Ferguson

Lynne Missen

Ken Setterington

Charmaine Welch

Also by Polly Horvath

ALSO BY POLLY HORVATH

An Occasional Cow (Pictures by Gioia Fiammenghi)

No More Cornflakes

The Happy Yellow Car

When the Circus Came to Town

The Trolls

Everything on a Waffle

The Canning Season

The Vacation

The Pepins and Their Problems (Pictures by Marylin Hafner)

The Corps of the Bare-Boned Plane

My One Hundred Adventures

Northward to the Moon

Mr. and Mrs. Bunny—Detectives Extraordinaire! (Pictures by Sophie Blackall)

One Year in Coal Harbor

Lord and Lady Bunny—Almost Royalty! (Pictures by Sophie Blackall)

About the Author

ABOUT THE AUTHOR