Shira stares at patterns in the hay, and soon she’s imagining: weaving a basket for a hot-air balloon, constructing a hay ladder to the moon, laying down a roadway out of the barn. If she were to set the stalks down end to end, would they take her as far as the meadow? Would they take her all the way home? She extends a single strand toward the silvery spiderweb slung in the low corner between a rafter and the loft wall. She doesn’t poke at its intricate threads, doesn’t cause the small black spider to scurry and build a new home.

Her mother’s whisperings—“Shall I tell you more of The Snow Maiden, I don’t think I explained the whole story; or would you rather I read to you a bit?”—have a false ring, so Shira overrides them with a noise: a squeaky single-note chirp, louder than she intended.

As soon as the chirp leaves Shira’s mouth, she regrets it. Her mother rears at her, pale and puffy faced. Worse than a harsh scolding is the dented look in her eyes.

Shira retreats, contrite. Hardly moving, she changes into the new dress Henryk brought her. She wants to stand up and twirl, see how the skirt swings in the air, but she stays down, still and silent, clutching her blanket. There are new bumps at the blanket’s seam. Shira doesn’t ask her mother about them. She’ll ask later, when her mother is happy again.

Henryk comes into the barn in broad daylight. He perches on the loft ladder and speaks to Róża in low tones, his words muffled by his bearded lips.

After he leaves Shira asks, “Does Pan Wiśniewski want to marry you?” He looks at her mother the way Tata did.

“What? Hush yourself!”

Shira decides to move her treasures to new hiding spots. She takes the pottery shards from the nook made by the crosstie and rafter and stows them inside a little pouch that her mother sewed her when they first arrived here and that Shira decorated with puffs of rabbit fur. The two ceramic bits she’d hidden together along the back wall of the loft she separates, hiding one on top of the crossbeam and the other behind the highest rung of the ladder, beneath hay. She opens the atlas to Africa—she is excited by the notion of an Ivory Coast—and stows some of her treasures in a corner she imagines deep inside the caves near Mount Nimba, some at the water’s edge.

Her mother has bad poops in the basin. Shira pushes her face deeper in the atlas to escape the smell. She traces a finger along the arced coastline, imagining herself an explorer.