Well, the older sister thought, an island is never really quiet. Even without the storm, there were waves and wind and air-conditioners and generators and animals moving out there in the dark.
What the storm had erased was the silence from the other cabin. For hours, there had been no laughing, no bottle caps falling, none of the bickering that the girls had grown used to over the past two days.
This was because there were no more adults. They’d been left alone on the island, the two little girls. Four and seven. Pretty little things, strangers called them. What dolls! Their faces were exactly like their mother’s. Hoochies-in-waiting, their mother joked, but she watched them anxiously from the corner of her eye. She was a good mother.
The fluffy white dog had at least stopped his yowling. He had crept close to the girls’ bed, but when they tried to stroke him he snapped at their hands. The animal was torn between his hatred of children and his hatred of the wild storm outside.
The big sister said, Once upon a time, there was a—
—princess, the little sister said.
Rabbit, the big sister said.
Rabbit princess, the little sister said.
Once upon a time, there was a tiny purple rabbit, the older sister said. A man saw her and scooped her up in his net. Her family tried to stop him, but they couldn’t. The man went into the city and took the rabbit to a pet store and put her into a box in the window. All day long people stuck their hands in to touch the purple rabbit. Finally, a girl came in and bought the rabbit and took her home. It was better there, but the rabbit still missed her family. She grew and slept with the girl in her bed, but most days she stared out the window all sad. She began to forget that she was a rabbit. One day, the girl put a leash on the rabbit and they went out into the park. The rabbit looked up and saw another rabbit staring at her from the edge of the woods. They looked at each other long enough for her to remember that she was not a girl but a rabbit, and the other rabbit was her own sister. The girl was kind to her and gave her food, but the rabbit looked at her sister and she knew that this was her only chance. She slipped out of the collar and ran as fast as she could over the field, and she and her sister hopped into the forest. The rabbit family was so happy to see her. They had a party, dancing and singing and eating cabbage and carrots. The end.
The little sister was asleep. The two fishing cabins rocked on their stilts, the dock ground against the shore, the wind spoke through the cracks in the window frames, the palms lashed, the waves shattered and roared. The older girl held her little sister.
All night, she and the island were awake, the island because it never slept, the girl because she knew that only her ferocious attention would keep them safe.
Before they were left alone in the fishing camp on the island in the middle of the ocean, there had been Smokey Joe and Melanie. They were strangers to the girls. He wore a red bandanna above his eyebrows. Her shirts couldn’t hold in all her flesh.
The older girl knew that the two adults were nervous, because they didn’t stop smoking and arguing in hushed voices while the girls watched “Snow White” over and over. It was the only tape they’d brought. In the afternoon, Smokey Joe took the girls on a walk to the pond at the center of the island. It was a weird place. Beyond the sandy bay where the dock and the cabin were, the land grew rough with a kind of spongy stone and the trees seemed shrunken and bent by the wind.
Watch out, he told them. A Hollywood movie had been made here a long time ago and some monkeys had escaped. You come close, they’ll rip your hair out and steal your food from your bowl and throw poop at your head. He was joking, maybe. It was hard to tell.
They didn’t see any monkeys, though they did see huge black palmetto bugs, a rat snake sunning itself on the sandy path, long-necked white birds that Smokey Joe called ibises.
In the cabin, Melanie gave them hamburger patties without ketchup or buns and told them not to touch the dog because he was a mean little sucker. The younger sister didn’t listen, and suddenly her forearm was bleeding. Melanie shrugged and said, Told you. The older girl got one of their mother’s Maxi Pads from her dopp kit and wrapped it, sticker side out, around her sister’s arm.
Smokey Joe sat outside all afternoon under the purple tree with its nubby green-banana fingers. He was listening to his CB radio. Then he stood up and shouted for Melanie. Melanie ran out, her breasts and belly moving in all kinds of directions under her shirt. The older sister heard Smokey Joe say, Safer to leave ’em.
Melanie poked her head into the cabin. She was pale under her orangey tan.
She said, Stay here. If someone shows up, don’t you go with no man. Girls, listen to me. Stay here, be good. I’ll send a lady to get you in a few hours.
The girls went outside and watched Smokey Joe and Melanie running down the dock. Melanie was screaming for the dog, but the dog stood still and didn’t follow her. And then Joe threw off the lines and Melanie jumped into the boat, almost missing it. One leg dangled in the water, then she lifted it over the side and they took off at full speed.
Before that, exactly one day before Smokey Joe and Melanie left the girls alone on the island, their mother had come to them in their own cabin, and she was dressed all fancy and smelled like a garden. Her boyfriend Ernesto and she were going out in Ernesto’s boat, she said. We’ll only be gone for an hour or two, honey bears. She pressed them close to her, her face made up with blue eyeshadow, her eyelashes so thick and long that it was a wonder she could see. She left red kisses on their cheeks.
But the hours clicked by and she didn’t come back at all. When night fell, the girls had to sleep on the floor in Melanie and Smokey Joe’s cabin, and Melanie and Smokey Joe whispered behind their bedroom door all night.
And, two days before that, their mother had come into the girls’ room in Fort Lauderdale in the middle of the night and thrown a few of their things into a bag and said, We’re going on a boat ride, pretties! Ernesto’s going to make us rich, and she laughed. Their mother was so beautiful she just glinted off light. Before the sun was even up, they were on Ernesto’s boat, going fast through the dark. And then they’d come to this little island, and the adults had talked all day and all night in the other cabin, and their mother had seemed wild on the inside, flushed on the outside.
And before Ernesto, many nights before him, their mother would come home very late, jangling. She usually made dinner for the girls, then left the older girl in charge of getting her sister’s teeth brushed and reading her to sleep. The older girl never slept in her own bed, always just stayed beside her sister until their mother was home. Sometimes, when the mother came in, she would get the girls up in their nightgowns, the night still in the windows, and sprinklers spitting in the courtyard, and she’d smell of vodka and smoke and money, and would put music on too loud and they’d all dance. Their mother would smoke cigarettes and fry up eggs and pancakes that she’d top with strawberry ice cream. She’d talk about the other women she worked with. Idiots, she called them. Skanks. She didn’t trust other women. They were all backstabbing bitches who’d rob you sooner than help you. She liked men. Men were easy. You knew where you were with men. Women were too complicated. You always had to guess. You couldn’t give them an inch or they’d ruin you, she said.
Before they came to Fort Lauderdale’s blazing sun they had been in Traverse City, where the older girl remembered only cherries and frozen fingers.
Before Traverse City, San Jose with its huge aloe plants and the laundromat below their apartment chugging all day.
Before San Jose, Brookline, where the little sister came to them in a tiny blanket of blue and pink stripes, a cocked hat.
Before Brookline, Phoenix, where they lived with a man who may have been the little sister’s father.
Before Phoenix, she was too small to remember. Or maybe there was nothing.
The morning was painfully clear. Once, at Goodwill, the mother had found a glass that she rang with a fingernail, and the glass sang in a high and perfect voice. The sunlight was like that after the storm.
There was nobody to tell them not to, so they ate grape jelly with spoons for breakfast. They watched “Snow White” on the VCR again.
The dog whimpered at the door. He had a little pad in the bathroom where he did his business. Melanie’s so damn lazy, their mother had muttered when she first saw the pad. What a lazy bitch. But maybe, the older sister thought, the dog just needed a little air. She got up and put his pink leash on, and let him out. The dog went down the steps so fast that he pulled the leash out of her hand. He looked back at the girl, and she could see the gears turning in his head, then he sped off into the woods. She called for him, but he wouldn’t come.
She went inside and didn’t tell her sister what had happened. It wasn’t until dinner—tuna fish and crackers and cheese—that the little sister looked around and said, Where’s the dog?
The older sister shrugged and said, I think he ran off.
The little sister started crying, and both girls went outside with a bowl of water and a can of tuna and opened it and called and called for the dog. He trotted out of the forest. There were sticks in his fur and mud on his belly, but he looked happy. He wouldn’t come near the girls, only growled until they went inside, and then watched them through the screen door as he gulped down his food. The older sister lunged out the door and tried to grab his leash, but he was too fast and disappeared again.
The little girl stopped crying only when her sister brought out Melanie’s cookies. Don’t you touch my damn Oreos, she’d said to them, but she wasn’t around to yell now. They ate them all.
Late at night, there was a terrible grinding sound and the girls went outside with flashlights and looked at the air-conditioning unit, and saw that a brown snake had fallen into it from the palm trees; with every turn of the blade, a millimetre more of the snake was being eaten by the fan. They watched the snake dissolve bit by bit until the skin fell all the way through and lay, empty of meat, on the ground.
The girls woke up sticky and hot. The air-conditioning had died sometime before dawn.
The older one thought the snake had gummed things up, but nothing was working—no lights, no water pump, no refrigerator—and then she understood that it was the generator. She went out back and kicked it. She found a hole where the gas went in and looked inside with her flashlight.
We runned out of gas, she told her sister, who was sucking her fingers again, the way she had when she was a baby.
Fix it, the little sister said, I’m so hot. But they looked and looked and there was no more fuel. When the older sister tried to flush the toilet, it wouldn’t flush. When the cabin started to smell from the toilet and the dog’s pad, they moved back to the other cabin, where their mother’s stuff was still in the closets and on the dresser. They began going to the bathroom outside.
There was no food in their cabin, so they took everything they could find from Melanie and Smokey Joe’s. Frozen peas, which they ate like popcorn, one Hungry-Man TV dinner, which they opened and left out for the dog. A block of cheese and yellow mustard. White bread, more cheese in a spray can, a can of beans. Bourbon and cigars that smelled like a spice drawer.
In the afternoon, they put on their mother’s clothes, her makeup. They looked like tiny versions of her, both of them, though the little sister didn’t need to go in the sun to be tanned.
The older sister read everything she could to her little sister. There was one fat book, yellow and swollen, on Melanie’s nightstand. It had a man on the cover with an axe over his shoulder but no shirt. She read the cereal box she dug out of the garbage. She read the old magazines on the coffee table.
The older girl understood that there was no more water only when they were thirsty and she tried to turn on the faucet. She ignored her thirst for a long time, until her throat felt stuffed with cotton and the little girl wouldn’t stop complaining.
It was going to be dark in a half hour or so. The sun was burning at the edge of the ocean.
The older sister sighed. I think we have to walk to the pond, she said.
The little sister started to cry. But the monkeys, she said.
We’ll make lots of noise. They won’t bother us if we’re together, the older sister said, and they walked very fast, hand in hand, to the pond, and it was twilight when they got back. The girls saw a white flash in the woods, and the little one was so frightened that she dropped her bucket and spilled half her water, and she ran all the way back to the cabin, slamming the door. The older sister cried with rage and carried the buckets back by herself. Out of meanness, she wouldn’t let her little sister drink the water until she’d put it in a saucepan and set it over the charcoal grill to boil, which took a very, very long time, until the moon was fat and bright in the sky.
In the morning, the older girl took out her sister’s braids and the little one’s hair fluffed out into a beautiful dark cloud.
They took the only knife, a steak knife, and whittled points into the ends of sticks, and they went into the chilly shallow water to fish, because they’d have to find food soon. But the water was so nice and the fish were so little that they abandoned the spears and swam all morning.
They painted their fingernails with polish they found in Melanie’s medicine cabinet. Then they painted their toenails, then tattoos of hearts on their biceps, which made their skin itch until they scratched the hearts off.
They found a candy bar in a nightstand, then a dirty magazine under Smokey Joe’s bed. A woman was licking a pearl off another woman’s pink private skin.
Yuck, the older sister said and threw the magazine, but the younger sister made the noises the mother made when she was in her bedroom with her boyfriends. Then she started crying. At first she only shook her head when her sister asked her why. Finally she said, I miss the dog.
Nobody could miss that dog, the older sister thought.
How could Melanie leave him? the little sister said.
Then the older sister thought, Oh.
Let’s go on a dog hunt, she said.
They took the steak knife, binoculars, an old whiskey bottle with the last of their boiled water, and a giant panama hat they’d found in a closet, which the older sister wore because she burned to blisters all the time. They took the rest of the crackers and sprayed themselves with the last of Melanie’s Skin So Soft bug spray.
The little sister was happy again. It was early afternoon. There was no wind, and the heat of the clearing cooled when they went into the forest. They sang the dog’s name, walking. The older sister nervously scanned the branches for monkeys.
The pond held a great gray heron, unmoving, like a sculpture. There were cypress knees, like stalagmites, in the shallows.
On the far side of the pond, there was a small wooden rowboat turned upside down. It was a flaking blue. The older sister kicked it, wondering how to drag it through the forest toward the cove and the dock. Then she wondered how she would make sure, once they’d launched it, that they floated toward land, and not into the deep-blue sea. Maybe it was best just to wait for the lady Melanie was supposed to send.
When she looked up, her little sister had vanished. Her heart dropped out of her body. She called her sister’s name, then screamed it over and over.
She heard a laugh from below, and her sister slid out from under a lip of rock that made a shallow invisible cave. That was so mean, the older sister yelled, and the little sister shrugged and said, Sorry, though she wasn’t.
There could’ve been snakes there, the older sister said.
But there weren’t, the little one said.
They walked all the way across the island and found a yellow-sand beach on the other side. Their dresses were soaked with sweat when they got back to the pond and filled the whiskey bottle up with green water.
Back in the fishing camp, the dog was waiting on the steps. The girls poured out unboiled water for him, and the dog lapped it up, watching them with his angry black-button eyes. Even though the little sister sang softly to him in her voice that their mother always said would knock the angels out of Heaven, the dog wouldn’t come near, and backed into the forest again.
The girls’ clothes were so dirty that they put on Smokey Joe’s last two clean T-shirts. They swept the path behind the girls like ball gowns when they ran, flashes of red and blue through the green-gold forest.
The little sister carried her bucket all the way back from the pond without complaining.
They caught three crabs under the dock with their hands and boiled them, and the flesh tasted like butter, and the water they boiled the crabs in they drank like soup, and afterward they felt full for a little while.
Then the rest of the food was gone. The bananas on the tree, Smokey Joe had said, were not ripe yet and would make them sick if they tried to eat them. The older sister had heard of people eating bugs and there were plenty of cockroaches everywhere, but the thought of the crunch under her teeth made her feel ill.
They ate cherry ChapStick. They opened an unlabelled can they found in the back of the cabinet, mandarin oranges. They ate strange red berries from the bushes, though the mother had always said never to do that.
I’m hungry, the little sister said.
Once upon a time, the big sister said, there was a boy and a girl whose family had no food at all. You could see their ribs. The mother had a boyfriend who didn’t like the kids. One day, the boyfriend told the mother that they had to get rid of the kids and that he was going to take them for a hike and leave them way out in the woods. The girl had heard the adults talking that night, and in the morning she filled her pockets with cereal.
They weren’t starving if they had cereal, the little sister said.
The girl filled her pockets with blue pebbles from the fish tank. And when the boyfriend led them out into the woods she dropped the pebbles one by one by the side of the path, so that when he vanished they could find their way back. The boy and the girl followed the stones home, and the mother was so happy to see them. But the boyfriend grew angry. The next day, he took them out again, but he’d sewn up their pockets so they couldn’t leave a trail. He left them, and they wandered and wandered and found a cave to hide in for the night. The next morning they smelled wood smoke and followed it to find a little cabin out in the woods, made of cookies and candy. So they ran over and started taking bites out of the house, because they hadn’t eaten in a long time. A lady came out. She was nice to them, and she kept giving them cake and mini pizzas.
And milk, the younger sister said. And apples.
There was a television. The lady didn’t even make them sit down to eat their food; they just lay there and watched cartoons and ate all day long. The boy and the girl got really fat. And when they were superfat the lady tied them up and tried to shove them into the oven like turkeys. But the girl was smart. She said, Oh, let me give you one last kiss! And the lady leaned her head forward, and the girl took a bite out of her throat. Because she’d become a champion eater at the lady’s house, she ate the lady all the way down until there was nothing left, not even blood. And the boy and the girl stayed all winter eating the cookie house, and when spring came they’d turned into adults. Then they went to find the boyfriend.
Why? the little sister said.
To eat him, the older sister said.
People eat people? the little sister said.
Sometimes you just have to, the big sister said.
No, the little sister said.
Fine. The lady was made of whipped cream, then, the older sister said. They never found the boyfriend. But they would have eaten him if they had.
The older sister’s head was gentle with clouds. The sand of the bay smelled like almonds to her. She was sitting alone by the charcoal grill, waiting for the water to boil. Her sister was inside, singing herself to sleep. She was happy, the older sister realized. Overhead was the thinning moon. Across the water came the squeak and rattle of some big birds with blood-red throats that were passing on their way to somewhere colder, somewhere larger, somewhere better than here.
There’s a man, the little sister said from the screen door.
There’s no man, the older sister said dreamily.
He’s in a boat. On the dock, the little sister said, and now the big sister could hear the purr of the motor. She stood up so fast that her head lost blood and she fell and then got to her knees and stood again.
Go, she whispered, and dragged her sister through the door, down the steps, into the woods.
They crouched in the ferns, and the ferns covered them. They were naked, and the ground beneath their bare feet could have been full of snakes, lizards, spiders.
The man’s boots pounded down the dock. He came into view. He was stocky, with jeans and a sweaty T-shirt, a thick gold chain around his neck. The older sister knew—something whispered silently to her—that he was in fact a bad man.
Be quiet, the whisper said. Get away.
He went into the girls’ cabin and there were crashing noises; he went into Melanie and Smokey Joe’s cabin and again there were crashing noises. When he came out, he kicked over the grill, and the older girl put her hand over her sister’s mouth to keep her from crying out. He turned around slowly, looking into the woods.
Come on out, he shouted. He had an accent. I know you’re here.
He waited, and said, We got your mama with us. Don’t you want to see your mama? We’ll make you a big old feast and you can sit in her lap and eat it all up. Bet you’re hungry.
The older sister struggled to keep the little one from standing. The man must have heard, because his head swivelled in their direction.
Run, the older girl said, and they ran through the woods, the palmettos lashing at their ankles and making them bleed. They found the path, they found the pond.
The older girl slid into the cave near the boat, then her little sister came in, and she held her tightly.
Soon they heard the man’s footsteps crashing and his breath wheezing in and out, hard. Girls, he said, I saw you. I know you’re around here.
His boots came into view, so close. He moved toward the boat, and kicked it once, twice, then the girls saw the rotten wood break apart and a hundred frightened bugs ran out.
Fine, he said. Ain’t going to chase you all day. Starve to death if you like.
The girls were silent, shaking, until they heard his footsteps fading. After too long, they heard the boat start up, then the motor thinned and he was gone. Still, they waited.
There was a rustling at their feet, and the little dog slunk out of the cave, where he must have been hiding all this time, inches away. The girls watched him gather the pink leash in his mouth and trot himself off.
Where’s the lady? the little sister said. She’s taking a long time.
What lady? the older sister said.
The one to save us, the little sister said. That Melanie’s sending.
The older sister had forgotten there was supposed to be a lady. The girls were deep in their nest. They’d taken all the pillows and sheets in the camp and piled them in the middle of the living room of their cabin, where a breeze passed over their sweaty bodies on its way from the screen door out the window. It was late in the morning, but the girls’ bones didn’t want to get up. Lie still, the bones said. Their hearts made music in their ears.
The older sister could almost see the lady now, coming down the dock. She’d wear a blue dress with a skirt so huge they could hide beneath it; she’d have their mother’s yellow hair that was dark at the roots. She’d smile down at them. Girls, she’d whisper. Come home with me.
They hadn’t eaten in three days. Somewhere not too far away, the white dog had howled all night until his howls sounded like wind. The older sister had dreamed of the courtyard of their Fort Lauderdale apartment, of the fountain’s turquoise water and the red-dyed cedar mulch and the tree heavy with sweet oranges that almost peeled themselves in your fingers, the golden sun pouring down over everything, all of it shimmering but untouchable, as if behind glass.
Night came, day came, night came.
The dog had gone silent. The little sister’s ribs were sharp beneath her skin. Her eyes were hot, the way their mother’s were hot when she came home from work, wanting to dance, smoke, sing.
The older sister’s body was made of air. She was a balloon, skidding over the ground. The light on the waves in the bay made her cry, but not with sadness. It was so beautiful, it wanted to speak to her; it was about to say something if she only watched hard enough.
The zip of a mosquito near her ear was a needling beauty. She let the mosquito land on her skin, and slowly it pulsed and pumped and she felt her blood rising up into the small creature.
It was all so much. Through the years to come, she’d remember these days of calm. She’d hold these beautiful soft days in her as the years slowly moved from terrible to bearable to better, and she would feel herself growing, sharpening. She’d learn the language of men and use it against them: she’d become a lawyer. Her little sister, so lovely, so fragile, only ever wanted to be held. For a long time, the older sister was the one who did this for her. She was the shell. But then the little sister met a man who first gave her love, then withdrew it until she believed the things he believed. He made her give up her last name, which the older sister had fought their whole childhood to keep, though their third foster parents had wanted to adopt them, because it was the only thing they had of their mother. And then one day the older sister stood in the pews and watched her baby sister get married to this man. She wore a white dress with a skirt so giant she could barely walk, and bound herself to him. The older sister watched and started to shake. She cried. An ugly wish spread in her like ink in water: that she and her sister had stayed on the island all those years ago; that they’d slowly vanished into their hunger until they turned into sunlight and dust.
Once upon a time, the older sister croaked, and the little sister whispered, No. Shush, please.
Once upon a time, the older sister said, there were two little girls made out of air. They were so beautiful that everyone who saw them wanted to scoop them up and put them into their pockets. One day, the god of wind saw them and loved them so much that he lifted them up and took them with him to the clouds to be his daughters. And they lived there forever with their father, and it was full of rainbows and people singing and good things to eat and soft beds made of feathers.
The end, the little sister said.
The younger sister dozed in the cabin. The older one let her body float above the path to the pond and back with water. There was no more charcoal, so they had to boil it over sticks she collected on the way back.
Twenty feet from the cabins, she heard the slightest of sounds. She peered into the palmettos and saw a glint of metal. She walked through the prickles and not one reached out to scratch her.
It was the dog. He had spun his leash so tightly around a scrub oak that his tongue was extended and his eyes bulged. He was no longer white fluff but knots of yellow and brown string.
The girl took the steak knife from her belt and knelt and sawed and sawed. She had to take breaks, because she kept getting dizzy. At last the leash broke and the dog stood and stumbled off into the underbrush again. There he would live forever, the girl knew. He would stay in that forest, running and howling and eating birds and fish and lizards. That dog was too mean to ever die.
She came back to find her sister naked outside the cabin, under the banana tree. Look, the little girl said, sucking her fingers.
The older sister looked but saw nothing. She did not see the unripe bananas like stubby fingers hanging down, which had been there when she went to get the water; she did not see the peels, which she would find later in the garbage.
There was a monkey, the little sister said. A tiny, tiny monkey. It had fingers like person fingers. It sat on the roof and peeled the bananas and ate them all up.
The older girl looked at the little sister. She stared back with round eyes. There was a long silence, and something in the older sister turned away, even as she nodded.
All right, then. There was a monkey.
Now, over the wind, all the way across the pond, from the beach on the other side of the island, there came a noise the older sister caught, then lost, then caught again. It was a song their mother had often sung along to on the radio in the car. A song—that meant a radio. The older girl took her sister’s face in her hands. We got to get ready fast, she said. Then we got to run.
They scrubbed themselves in the waves and, wet, put on their mother’s dresses, the only clean things there were. Shifts in tropical patterns that came down below the older girl’s knees, to the younger one’s ankles; on their mother those dresses were so short you could sometimes see her underwear when she was sitting down. They poured her perfume all over their wrists and heads.
Then they ran. They stopped when they were still among the trees, breathing heavily.
There was a boat anchored not far out, and a rubber dinghy pulled up on the wet part of the sand and a fishing pole buried next to it. A woman lay on a blanket. She was white, though her shoulders and thighs were going pink. She was plump. She was mouthing along to a different song on the radio, her feet waggling back and forth in time.
There was a man beside the dinghy with his swimming trunks down to his knees. He was peeing, the girls saw. He didn’t even wash his hands in the waves, but went over to the woman and stooped and put them in a cooler for a minute, then popped them under the woman’s bikini bottom while she screamed and swatted at him.
He laughed and took a beer can from the cooler and opened it and drank deeply, and picked up a sandwich in waxed paper. The older sister’s mouth watered. She was glad when he crumpled the paper up and didn’t litter but put it neatly back into the cooler.
The older girl looked at her sister. She was wild. You could see all her bones. The older sister took the brown leaves out of the little one’s hair, brushed the dirt off her dress, took out their mother’s lipstick, which she’d put into her pocket as they ran out the door. She put lipstick on her sister’s lips, then made tiny circles on her cheeks. Now me, she ordered, and her little sister’s face pursed in concentration and the lipstick tickled on her own cheeks and lips.
She put the lipstick back into her pocket. She would keep the gold cartridge of it long after the makeup inside was gone and only a sweet waxy smell of her mother remained.
Ready? she said. Her sister nodded and took her hand. Together they stepped out of the shadows and onto the blazing beach.
The woman on the blanket looked up at them, then shaded her eyes with a hand to see better. Later the woman would visit the girls once, then disappear after she left the older sister a gift, a vision of how the sisters had looked just then: ghost girls in clown makeup and floral sacks, creeping out of the dark forest. The woman’s mouth opened and a cry of alarm stuck in her throat. She raised her arms in amazement. The girls took the gesture for a welcome. Though they were very tired and felt tiny under the angry sun, they ran.
來源：紐約客（2017.08.21）
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