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“An arh to tempt anyone in this place They have hundreds of arms at the end of any reach”

“It will tempt Vhuh”

I was silent for a long while, and the other children, young and new, snuffled in their gray beds

“It is a good plan, Oubliette But not for you I will put my arm beneath the stamp, I will let it cut into my shoulder, and you will remain whole”

Her thick eyebrows furrowed and she scowled at rown, scruffy-limbed infant when it comes to pain”

I held her face in ainst the tips of ers like quills

“My aret more money”

She said nothing—what could she say to that?

“You will cry out”

“I will not”

We held each other all that night, and she kissed—the only kiss she ever gave me—the spot where my shoulder joined my arm

In the Garden

THE BOY HAD LEFT HER

He always left her Eachafter that one She did not , to remember so much of ritten on her eyelids, to be close to another child when she had been alone for so long She had not kno that could tire her And so it was that when he had gone from her, she often went into the placid Garden lake, to let the cool water, rippling like a dress pulled up above the knees, wash him away from her The hard, round pebbles under her bare feet were co—she had always had the cattails, and the ht of the boy, how eagerly she waited for hiranate trees, yet how often she was eone, like a painted vase whose water has been flung out onto the flagstones It was so easy to ht, when you have never missed anyone before

She knew her stories so well, she did not lose them when she spooled them out to him—she told herself this over and over They were still her own, her own But when the words of the tales passed her lips and wound into his ears, they seerow li into each other like snails winding into their shells When she had been alone, and whispered those tales into nothing more than the surface of a little pond or a thatch of blackberries, they had stayed thin and wispy, shreds of a gohich did not quite fit her fluttering in the wind She was happy to see therow solid—she told herself this over and over, too