You're five-six-seven-eight-nine years old. You're running with scraped knees and a stick retrieved from a mossy bank. Your mom worries about glass by the river; you collect it like the near-opaque shards are thin, curved emeralds, like the jagged neck of the bottle the fish avoid is some faraway queen's crown brought there by the languid waters. You reinvent animal husbandry— in a stained Tupperware you gather worms, gather pill bugs, a slug or two, with onion grass and dirt

I see people where they are not. The first fragment was Hannah in the body of a girl with red hair and olive skin. I stopped walking in the revolving door of Starbucks, and it hit my back as she walked out. A smile lingered even after I realized I’d been duped. It was funny at first—the girl, upon reconsideration, didn’t remind me of my sister at all. Guilt followed. I felt as though I’d somehow betrayed her. Hannah’s hair isn’t red like bright cherry suckers are, nor is it t

The sky is surely collapsing. The rolling maelstrom of man-made thunder is constant, never stopping. There is no more blue up in the sky when I look. There are only swirls of gray and orange and red. Arcs of fire and death fly far above our heads, the ear-splitting cannonade of metal pounding the ground far away with such force that surely all those in hell can feel each strike. The French will most definitely feel it, as our shells are directed towards them. The enemy lines