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“You only asked theive them mouths They’re like Scratch; they talk with the parts they have Though Gertrude seems to know Morse code”

The green glass la

Under her hands a chartreuse tree was growing Its leaves unfurled in ultraht

Thomas looked up at the chandelier in the parlor

“Will-o’-the-wisp, if you come out today I shall love you until I am dead”

Thomas wrote to the chandelier He called her Citrine as he always had I shall not tell you what he wrote, for so fixture are secret and strange He got up onto a ladder and coiled the note around one of the silver flourishes hung with crystal He waited His heart felt as though it were bursting and collapsing back and bursting again

Nothing happened No will-o’-the-wisp soared up out of the lights and settled on his shoulder Thomas shook his head It was the first disappointment of his neorld He tried to reason it out To invent a rule, for rules give one a little kingship over disappointments It was not, after all, Thomas’s fault if he had run afoul of a Law of the Universe They weren’t posted; he hadn’t known

“I think s,” he called out to Talass pinecone innew, soht: Is this what a troll does? Is this troll ic?

But Tamburlaine did not answer She was too full of her new trees

Dear Arabesque, Who Is a Girl Dancing with Orchids in the Hallway Painting… Thoan to write He concentrated so fiercely that he did not see a pair of crystal legs bathed in daffodil-colored light unfold fro and pirouette down He did not see the slender, gentle body of teardrop-shaped crystals, nor the hair of silver curling chandelier arlass bulbs until he turned round to take his new note to the girl in the hallway painting Thomas stared at Citrine She stared back Not a will-o’-the-wisp—alive all the salasshi Ta her with jeweled fingers, , lovely three-person step fro behind the his needle double-quick, back and forth across the record:

How ya gonna keep ’em down on the farm,

After they’ve seen Paree?

But then, in the second hour, Thoame, for Nicholas and Gwendolyn would not stay away forever The wild objects of Apartlass lamp and the vase of irises leaned in, the woodstove strained to hear frorandfather clock put his hands into his best attentive position The girl in the painting put down her orchids and stood on tiptoe The chandelier sat cross-legged on the parlor rug Blunderbuss snoozed, uninterested, her yarn nose twitching

“Everybody, please, listen, this is very iether It’s a very easy gaht”

The green lahtedly