There’s a girl and a gust of wind and the house she left behind. A pale yellow house with mold in the corners and babies with fevers, and cigarette smoke in her nose and on the walls of her room, in her hair and in her bed sheets, and on the outside in the humid world beyond the broken door she crept out of at 2am.

They looked for her in the pastures and in the nooks, in the neck of the woods that smell green and lush and watery, and they looked up as if she might be in a tree staring down at them, but they never did find her.