She was frightened by the almost weightlessness of the blackberries in the folds of her skirt, the front corners of which she clutched in her small, stained hands. Tangled hair hung down her back, against her dress like a black stream through snowfields. She tossed her head to shake the curls from her eyes. She was barefoot on a forest path, watching in the bushes by the side of the trail for the shine of berries. When she found them she would put two in her skirt, eat two, save three more, eat another, slowly. For her the chore was a type of game, in which she could place her feet on cool patches of grass to avoid sharp pebbles in the ruts of the path. She could use her toe to stir silt in puddles. She did also gather berries, but it was not a task, merely a complication in the game. She tried to extend the time her walk took by slowing towards the middle. When she was near a familiar clearing, and had some idea of how much further it was to the house, she began to complicate the game by adding extra elements. She looked for a walking stick, for a certain kind of leaf or a flower for Marta, and looking required attention, slowness, concentration, bending down, sometimes crawling through dense brush with her coal-black eyes narrowed, her knees crushing blue-red juice into her skirt. When she was crawling, she placed her hands as deliberately as she always placed her feet. Her hand was in a composition- small slender fingers on rotting leaves, in shadow, then her hand in another composition, again on rotting leaves and in shadow but with the hand itself at a different angle because the ground beneath the leaves had become a flat stone, slightly raised. She scraped her knees and was aware of the hem of her skirt against the back of her ankles. If the others had not been children also, they may have noticed how long Annette stayed in the woods behind the house in the mornings. They might have scolded her because the berries were crushed, and they might have gasped to see the spreading berry-stain on her only dress. But they had no concern with the presentation of food or person. For the most part they understood that time and cleanliness are inventions.

Three hens and a rooster nested in the beams of the collapsed barn. There was piled grass and leaves in the corners of the foundation, and there sarah found the eggs. She stepped over the fallen beam that once completed the arch of the doorframe, and gingerly stepped through the rubble of rotten planks and dew-damp weeds. The hens were making distinctive, peculiar noises, low cooing and clucking, all the more peculiar in the stillness of morning and the glint of sunlight in the damp grass. The eggs shone where muted sunlight found them, with a sheen, softly glowing. Sarah collected them in a red bandanna, worn from use. With every egg she set the rag down over a patch of grass, and as it soaked in the wetness she placed the new egg carefully with the others. When she felt that she had them all she tied the corners diagonally opposite from one another together so she had a fragile sack, one that she needed to hold with both hands and support against her stomach, even though there were usually only six or seven eggs to carry. When she had her bundle ready she spread two handfuls of seed from her pocket on the ground, then sat down on a fallen beam, coaxed a stem of grass from it’s roots and listened to the hens while chewing the grass with her front teeth and trying to pull more up between her two big toes. Her skin shivered and goose pimples showed on her arms and legs, but as she sat with her feet in the grass, in a coveted spot of sunlight the cold morning dew began to burn off as she whistled and her vision expanded.

The room was an average size, maybe small for an adult, which is an irrelevancy. Julie felt that the walls spread and smoothed throughout the day, and there was space for everyone. She had put the metal mixing bowl near the middle of the circle of braided colored rags. She had set the four china teacups painted with english roses symmetrically around the bowl, and now she was using a little broom she had made from a stick and grass dried on the windowsill to sweep the ash back onto the grate of the fireplace, to sweep a little dust off of the wing- backed chair and the empty cabinet standing in a corner, to brush the dust from two windowsills, and the mantlepiece for which she had to stand on the high back of the chair, almost losing her balance when she lifted first one heavy brass candle holder and then the other. She reminded herself to replace the candles, as they were burned down to stubs with drowned wicks, wax dripped over the sides their holders in dull red rivulets. She looked around her, pleased with the symmetry and the order, then climbed down from and replaced the chair, walked back to the cabinet which was empty save one thing. She opened one glass door and felt along the back of the shelf until her fingers lifted the pin. She stuck the pin vertically in the exact center of the rug, then went to the window, bent a little to rest her elbows on the sill and stared out at the feild of blue flowers casting their blue shadows into green grass, shaking in the wind and bordered by pine trees.

Marta bent at the waist towards a stick but under her fingertips it was damp so she drew back. She pouted, breathed once fast, in and out through her nose, looked at the stick and decided to add it to the small bundle under her arm. She hated wet wood, not because it was difficult to light, which is why Julie hated it, but because it felt cold and dirty under her hands, on her skin. She tolerated it though, even expected it. Fifteen minutes of rain during the night could soak the wood and it wouldnt be dry by morning. Almost every morning started badly, with the wet wood, and for a seven year old girl it felt like a ruse, a trick on her specifically. Alternately, during a dry spell, when the bark was rough and dead wood broke easily, cracking once instead of bending and fibers slipping apart, Marta felt as if she was recieving a gift.

Annette with her ear against the wall, listening for the mice that dig plaster dust and splinters. She also hears them eating splinters and eggshells. As she is listening she occasionally lifts the egg in one hand and her teacup, by it’s delicate handle, with the other. Gently she places her lips on the egg, absently, without attention, and it’s contents shift with her breath, the bottom of the teacup glazed with egg. Marta is laughing at Sarah sprawled beside her. Marta holds her egg while she’s laughing and Sarah has to warn her not to crack it in her fist. She’s cracked eggs before, because she forgot she was holding them and because she was laughing so hard. Marta will not crawl to the middle of the rug and pluck the pin from it’s place to puncture the ends of her egg until Julie, sitting crosslegged in the wing-back chair, above the others, and faster than them, has hollowed two of her three eggs and once emptied the contents of her teacup into the bowl. Julie’s straight hair is tucked neatly behind her ears, and stays there. Marta watches Sarah blowing her egg and examines her own. She turns it around in her hand, practicing gentleness, then shakes it at her ear, then Sarah blows hard, a stream first of pale liquid and then suddenly the pool a ripening flower as the yolk blooms almost orange.Marta laughs and almost smashes her egg as she puts her hand down. Before Marta peirces her egg she kneels beside Sarah in front of the half-filled teacup and offers the pin to her. They settle onto their stomachs, cheek to cheek, their noses over the cup, elbows propped on the floor, and Marta watches as sarah begins to drag pin through egg, tracing shapes.

“Blueflowers” says Marta, quickly, softly. Sarah sweeps a stem, pin-thick, swallowing itself. A petal swallows itself and another petal. Petal after petal swallowed by egg, drowned in egg. Marta sees a feild of blue flowers in the cup.

“Ocean” she says “five little boats. No, four little boats.”

“With sails?”

“no”. Sarah traces the pin-thin trough and crest of wave after wave each peice of ocean drowned in egg, then has an idea and begin to chip shell around the puncture holes of her last egg blown. She places the four nicest chips in the cup, where they stay balanced on the surface. Only the smallest one begins to slip under. Odd boats. Marta sees an ocean on two different planes, The boats sail the sides of the waves. The waves rise and roll on two sides, crashing into their centers, spilling forward and to the left, pushed that way by the weight of the boats. She sees all the currents of oceans running outwards and to the left, continually boats thrown off of them to the left, and sideways. Her head spins. She cannot imagine a boat sideways and not turning over but remaining that way, and people sailing it on the water-face vertical edge of a wave breaking to the side. She is seeing this because Sarah drew the waves as if from the side into the egg and then placed the boats where the sides of her waves had been. “Julie” marta whispers loud enough to be heard. She smiles and looks sideways at sarah who is also smiling. Sarah uses the pin to quickly draw a circle head, elf ears, straight lines for hair, eyes too close together and an expressionless mouth. Every peice of the face drowns in egg.

Annette slumped against the wall is humming pure note after pure note after unrelated pure note. she likes to test herself on how long she can hold one note. She holds her eggshell to her lips for the pleasure of a resonance only she is aware of, because she feels the slight vibration against her lips.

Julie lines her eggs, blown clean, under her chair where they won’t be stamped all over. Marta holds her egg in both her hands like a chipmunk with a nut, but at first does not blow hard enough to start flushing it out.

Julie has created a twig fire to which she adds four large sticks, crossing one another at the ends, a tight square in the middle. She breathes into the flames, adds more kindling, then she lifts the bowl of egg and places it in the center of the fire. She chooses a stick from the bundle which she uses to stir the eggs as they slowly solidify, from the bowl-edge inwards towards the center. Annette is curled with her dirty bare feet under her in the chair, her fingers stroking Marta’s curly head, feeling for the matted hair without picking to untangle it. The effect of Annette’s touch is something very difficult to explain. There is an authority in her gentleness that can not be challenged. Marta will let no one near when Annette’s fingers are buried in her hair, and although Sarah will not crawl to these attentions, she will wait patiently for them. Sarah’s knees are drawn to her chest. Her ankles and thin white arms are bare. She gets up to scrape the salt block outside the door and to take a glass bottle that once held milk to the stream for water. Annette watches her go without moving her head. Marta and Julie do not notice, she is so nearly silent. When Sarah is out in the air, shades of blue knit at the height from every direction form an arc, an expanse. Her skin raises, trembles at the chill as she walks. Grasses to her knees flatten beneath her bare feet. The grass scratches her calves and ankles and makes her jump every few steps, skipping a diagonal across a feild of blueflowers turning golden blue into violet into black creeping from under the leaves.

Some time later that evening Julie was elected to go and look as they waited around the glowing embers of twig-fire becoming dust and glancing hungrily at the egg dish, wanting salt for it from the salt block and water to drink. This story would be easier to tell if it were possible to say that at that moment Sarah re-entered the room and they ate what they had extracted in a slightly different form and they licked purple berry juice from Annette’s fingertips and they invented stories together in their bed until they were too tired to go on. It would be easier to tell this story even, if Julie had discovered Sarah face down in the mud of the stream bed with her throat bruised and cut- that would be an ending.

Every night Sarah had slept in the circle of Annette’s arms and Marta’s warmth had curled around her feet just as Marta’s love curled around her eyes and voice in the day, but despite all this, it must be assumed that she chose to dissapear.