She had wings that sprouted out of her back, dripping a sticky mucous-like substance, and two antennae that curved upwards from her temples. Otherwise she looked like a regular girl. She leaned against the old horse fence, her arm hanging over the side. “You never read Proust?” she asked me. “No,” I said. “Never had the time to learn to read yet.”
Jamie rolled the rickety wheelbarrow with two cases of beer down the cobblestone streets around to the cellar entrance. There he lifted up the metal doors and rolled the wheelbarrow down the ramp into the cellar. It reeked of spilled, rancid beer and there were only a few lights that weren’t broken. Jamie always caught himself staring into the shadows, thinking he saw crouching figures or dogs but there was never anything down there with him. He’d unload the beer into the freezer room and load up whatever they were short on, sometimes throwing in a few bottles of wine from the wine room.
The snow was grey and hard, riddled with pebbles from the road. Little black squirrels ran to and fro, too fast to seem natural. Chennauk waited for the school bus, the winter sunlight too bright and her backpack too heavy with books. The bus was late and all that passed were rusty pickups spraying muddy water and gravel. The birds chirped and it should have been a happy morning but she had lost the drawing and nothing could make up for that.