WINDOW-STRUCK

LLE’S father was a boxer and a repo demolitionist. Six feet tall, two hundred pounds strong, bearded and bald, he dedicated his nights to boxing, and his days to breaking homes—specifically, his and Elle’s. The scent of her childhood was the smell of wounded wood and plaster dust, and the most common sight was that of her open carpet-bag, full of hidden splinters.

Besides scars and bruises, he accumulated debt and trouble. Therefore, the only place to sleep was a corner of some condemned building while he tore it down around them. When it was rubble, he moved them to the next doomed place, somewhere old and beautiful and unlike the factory that replaced it.

The city wanted more guns, more computers, more cameras; beauty was just excess.

A necessary sacrifice, her father said.

He said that about many things: no chocolate in the cabinet, no money for music lessons, no time to attend her graduation. Every resource they had went into his boxing career, and there it drained away.

The day she stood weeping as he put a sledgehammer through a stained-glass window was the day she swore she would be nothing like him.

So, when she stumbled upon a crowd gathered around the smoking wreck of a familiar black coupe, she couldn’t cry. She watched long enough to see the police extract two bodies, one of them six-foot-tall, two-hundred-pound-strong, then lifted her shopping bags with a swish and walked home. Only the birds on the roofs watched her go, feathers clinking, lens-eyes glowing red.

Her bags collapsed into piles at her feet, and she assessed the half-dismantled glass greenhouse.

The architect had been crazy or in love; the details were too expensive to believe anything else. It was like something out of a storybook: every inch of wall was colored glass, letting in green or red or golden light, until the greenhouse shone like a leafy cathedral. The shed in the back wall was brick, not clapboard, and possessed real opening windows; and rather than a pull handle, the builder had installed a brass knob. Even the cross-beams of the roof were not neglected, but painted emerald green.

Layered on top were the years of neglect. The plants were puny. Wind blew bitterly through gaps in the faraway ceiling, and the dilapidated shed-turned-house at the back lacked some shingles, but those things were cosmetic. Elle knew how shingles fit on and how glass was installed. Elle knew how plants were meant to grow.

HE owner of the conservatory had been in the car with her father. And she had nowhere else to go. A year later, the place was hers. Not legally, though no one ever came to reclaim it, but in the way that feet recognize a path toward home. The pile of extra glass she uncovered behind the shed, all shades of red, and orange, and fuchsia, and green, was not enough to fill all the gaps in the greenhouse. But it was enough that the plants within found it warm enough to thrive.

Buds and bushes found it especially pleasant, and soon she was able to keep up a regular stock of flowers at a stall down the street. Unmanned roadside stands were preferred these days, and selling flowers paid well enough to eat more than broth, so each week, she bought a little more glass and filled in a few more holes.

Her only company was a bird. Her bird. She spotted it one morning on the shed windowsill, its eyes shut, wings splayed, and silvery finish scuffed from a fall. Once the knee-jerk fear faded, Elle grew curious. She got her tools. Near midnight, she found the essential plug that connected it to the government satellites, and when the bird whirred back to life, its eyes were not network-streaming red, but black.

Other birds were a different problem. They smacked into the glass more often than navigating through it, but eventually they’d find a hole. Elle taped compost bags across the remaining gaps. When the birds found their way in, the bags held them until her hammer could silence their screaming alarms.

No one ever came to investigate the missing birds. Considering that and the birds’ uncharacteristic gracelessness near the greenhouse, Elle concluded the place sat in a sort of lucky spot where the network just couldn’t reach.

She couldn’t often venture out, but she had work enough to do indoors; the garden, the flower stand, the birds. She seldom sat still, but occasionally there would come a night when a certain sound made her pause. A mustachioed man lived on an upper floor of the tenement building down the road, and sometimes late at night, he would step onto a balcony and play into the silent street. Anywhere in the greenhouse, Elle stopped short. She prepared tea in the only teacup and listened as the notes floated down, seated between a rosebush and the beans. The violin sang about lonely secrets, and it seemed for all the world as though there were only two living things in the universe, Elle and the violin.

It had been weeks since the last strains of the violin when she heard a tussle in the street. She put her head down and walked faster.

Shouts echoed.

Buying her milk and bread in the late evening always invited creeping paranoia, but shopping in daylight meant being seen.

To her right, a curtain rustled shut. Ahead, a hunched woman vanished into her house. From within, a voice squawked: “Lock the door! You’ll let that winged man in.”

Winged man?

The door slammed. Steps echoed across cobblestones; Elle’s grocery bags slapped against her cargo pockets.

Shouts grew louder. A flash of light beamed from an alleyway, then across it dashed two long shadows. Elle’s heart leaped into her throat.

They aren’t looking for you. It’s the police hunting Cainites.

Then came the gunshot. Panic spiked through Elle’s heart, as though she were the one shot.

Elle’s boots thudded, faster now. The shouts and running footsteps had moved to another street. Someone barked orders to her right, cries answered from her left. Racing bootsteps ended in a scuffle, this time more violent than before.

Gunshots. Cainites. Police.

With relief, Elle turned down her own street. She urged herself not to run and attract attention, but her heartbeat sprinted.

The cobbles under her feet turned to brick. The greenhouse loomed overhead. It almost looked like another nondescript high-peaked roof between two wood-sided workshops. Only when the street’s single lamp shone on the glass just right could one glimpse the colors.

Almost there.

Coming in too fast, her fingers collided with the scrolled lever handle, and in answer the door bumped halfway open.

Elle’s boots stopped short. Bags swung to a sudden stop.

Someone had left the door open. Her? Or—

She inhaled to calm her heartbeat. Nowhere to run, and no one to help. The only way to go was in. She pushed the door shut with her boot’s heel, heard it click, smelled warm overturned earth. She fumbled for the cheap flashlight. The darkness of the greenhouse, usually a comforting shield against prying eyes, tonight looked more like an open mouth. Relief gushed through her veins as the weak yellow beam clicked on. She panned the light over ridges of earth and the bumpy tea rose bushes; nothing unexpected.

She returned the beam to the dirt path and ventured forward, only two steps. Ahead was a scrape in the dirt, a furrow from something pushing off.

Had she done that?

Just go to bed. It will all be better in the morning.

She pressed on between the rows. Then the flashlight passed over a silhouette that shouldn’t have been there. She heard a sound like someone trying to breathe through a tin can.

Elle gasped. The flashlight fell over a shape huddled between the bushes; knees tucked in, feathers reflecting the flashlight, hair wild, hands extended to ward off harm. It had a huge black beak.

The groceries fell with a crash. Elle leaped back and turned—but what did she think she could do? The lamplight outside filtered green through the door, but there was nowhere else to go. Screaming for help would attract the police—

Something shuffled behind her: the bird-man-thing had slipped out from the bushes and crouched in the pathway. It reached down a gloved hand and set the carton of milk upright, stopping its spilling.

The hand offered the milk to Elle.

Uncertain, she assessed the thing. It was approximately a man, long-limbed, covered in black from head to toe. Hair greased straight back like it was wind-blown, wings covering his arms to the wrist. “That winged man.” Shining, clinking feathers around his collar, hemming in a bleeding face buried beneath thick goggles and the raven-like beak attached to his lower face. No, not attached. Screwed in.

He moved so gently, so smoothly, placing the milk at her feet and then sliding back with a wince. Something about him, the shape of the feathers, of the unnatural wings, the light that reflected mirror-like from his goggles, even the nostrils sculpted into the beak, was familiar.

“Are you hiding from them?” Elle asked sharply. She lifted the carton slowly, condensation and milk spillage dripping down her fingers. “I am, too. But this is my home, and I can’t have the police come looking here.”

His head lowered, and the glint on his glasses disappeared long enough that she saw downcast eyes behind them, ringed in red.

Elle swallowed. She tried a gentler tone. “You can stay here tonight, but that’s it. Leave before dawn. Okay?”

The ravenish beak dipped as he nodded.

She slipped past the winged man, one step at a time. He didn’t lunge at her. Elle unlocked the shed-turned-living-quarters and slipped inside. She lit a candle and tucked her groceries into the icebox beside her mattress. Then she lifted the curtain an inch and peeked out, expecting him to be crouched on the path.

The winged man was nowhere to be seen.

LLE dried her face with a rag cut from one of her father’s old t-shirts. Tired eyes looked back at her from the mirror. She slapped her cheeks to drive away the sleep hangover and ran fingers through tangled hay-gold hair for only a moment before giving up. On went a fresh pair of pants, fresh-ish striped socks, and the green sweater with thumbholes that the manufacturer hadn’t put there. It only smelled a little musty, so it was clean enough.

She drank a glass of water, buttered some half-crushed bread, and ate. The sun glinted high through the shed window; by now the winged man would be gone. Downing the last of her water, she opened the shed door.

“Hey!”

Stretched gracefully between the bushes, the winged man slept on, ignorant to the sun glinting colorfully through the roof.

Elle snatched a rake leaning against the shed and used it to poke one of the metal-feathered boots. The reaction was immediate; he scurried backward, feathers rattling in the dirt. The eyes behind the goggles were wild.

“You. . . overslept.”

The tines of the rake dropped into the dirt. With the sun so high, the streets would not be empty. There would be no way for him to leave.

“You’ll have to wait until nightfall.”

The raven beak bobbed.

“And lay low,” she warned. “Stay away from the windows.”

She shuffled away and set about ignoring him while she picked dead bits off the geraniums. Within minutes, she felt him over her shoulder. With a rustle and a clank he held out a garbage pail.

“Oh.” Elle cautiously dropped her leaves into the pail. “Thanks.”

The day went on like this; she worked, and he materialized just in time with just what she needed. At last she assigned him his own duties and he flitted about the plants, working with silent grace.

At noon Elle’s stomach demanded food, so they broke for lunch. Laughter across the street told her the warehouse opposite was doing the same thing, they in their overalls and caps, and she and the winged man spaced between bushes with their cheese-and-salami sandwiches.

Elle subtly watched to see how he would eat. He tore individual pieces of bread and tucked them into some unseen hole beneath his beak. In the daylight, he looked less like a monster; he almost looked like someone she’d seen on a screen: an opera character, with his bird’s beak shut as a punishment.

“Hey,” she said, and his gleaming goggles turned toward her. She gestured with her sandwich. “You can’t take that off?”

He shook his head.

“Can someone else?”

He shrugged.

She thought of the toolbox beside the shed. “Do you want it off?”

Another head shake.

Back to work they went.

“Not near the windows,” she warned again, and he drew back toward the safety of the rose bushes.

“You know—” Elle set down her shears. “—I need to call you something. Do you have a name?”

He shrugged.

“You don’t know? Or you won’t say?” She wiped her sleeve down her temple.

Another shrug.

“Can I pick one, then?”

A nod.

She’d remembered the opera’s name: The Magic Flute. Its own winged man had a birdish name.

“How’s Papageno?”

He nodded, his eyes barely crinkling above a cut on his cheek. Did he recognize the name? Or was he just pleased to be called something?

With a whirr, Elle’s little bird friend landed on her shoulder. Its talons gripped her sweater for balance. Elle gave it a stroke, then took her shears and dug her arms into the bush.

“Could you get the can? Papageno?”

He turned, and for the first time, she saw the mangled mechanics on his back. A piston seemed to be jammed against his lower back through the black leather.

“That’s got to be hurting you.”

He offered the garbage pail and another shrug.

“I mean, I can look at it.” A thorn stabbed through Elle’s gloves, and she hissed. “I’ve had it with this rose bush, anyway. Sit down.”

He sat beside the toolbox. There were two of the piston things, probably meant to be parallel, but one was knocked sideways. She began to loosen screws.

Was helping him helping the Cainites? Papageno was friendly, and he looked like her bird, but that didn’t make him harmless. After she fixed him, would she hear of a massacre in the political district, chaos caused by a winged man?

The bird hopped to Papageno’s knee, and he offered it his gloved knuckle.

With the screws loose enough, the piston rattled, hinge-like. Good.

“Brace yourself.”

He planted his hands, and she wrenched the piston. The bird startled away.

Papageno hunched in pain, then arched, feeling the freedom of movement. He inhaled, deep and free.

Elle licked her lips. “Can—can you show me what those do?”

Papageno took a few steps, stretching his legs, and Elle realized that when aligned correctly, the pistons connected to wires running down to his thick-soled boots. He took a few steps down the path, then leapt. The pistons charged with a thump. He launched nearly to the faraway peak of the roof, where the wings snapped out, knifelike. He took a single, weaving loop between the green rafters.

The little bird resettled on Elle’s shoulder. Elle gave it a nod. “Going up?”

The bird’s eyes blinked, winked on, ruby red.

Connected.

“Oh, no! No!” Elle fumbled as it fluttered off. It was already too high. She ran to the shed and snatched the longest rake for reach. “I’ve got to—”

Papageno caught one of the rafters to stop his flight. He scanned the air.

“Right there!” Elle could spot the recording eyes as the bird looped through the beams. “We’ve got to catch it before it turns us in!”

Papageno crouched on the rafter. To Elle’s shock, his mask seemed to absorb the colored sunlight around him. It streamed through every crack in his raven’s beak.

Then he turned toward the network-streaming bird and unleashed a beam of screaming light.

Elle cried out. “No, stop!”

The first shot missed. It raked the wall behind the rosebushes, scorching the crossbeams as it went and shattering several of the colored windows. Papageno drank in light again. The beam chased her bird around the rafters as it shrieked.

Elle hurled her screwdriver. “Stop it!”

Too late. The beam caught up. The bird fell, smoking, into the geranium beds.

Elle raced to it. She cradled the bird in her shaking fingers. Red and blue wires smoked where its head had been.

Papageno’s pistons fired as he struck the ground, spraying dirt. His hands went up. Behind the goggles, two black eyebrows frowned.

“I said catch it!” Elle shouted. “I said—” She cut herself short. First, the loud laser beam, and now she was shouting. Anyone could hear. “We’re too loud,” she whispered. “We have to hide.”

The winged man’s hands continued to flap in protest as Elle marched to the shed door and yanked it open. “Or do you want to be found?”

Still frowning, Papageno ducked inside.

She scanned the many rows, taking quick stock of the garden. No tools left out in the dirt rows, no food beside the bushes, no signs of life. The evergreens against the front windows shielded almost everything, but noise could make anyone try to peek between branches. Elle shut the door behind her. Papageno perched awkwardly between the industrial sink and the door.

“Look.” Elle held up the broken metal bird and slowly unplugged the wire that connected to its battery.

Be gentle. Be gentle.

“That’s all I had to do. It would have turned off.”

She breathed deeply and set the bird reverently on the windowsill, then turned to Papageno.

“This is a house for fixing things, not breaking them. That’s the rule. Okay?”

Papageno nodded.

Elle stepped to the left, then to the right. There was no room to pace.

“Tough talking to someone who can’t answer.”

LLE crouched by the greenhouse door, listening to the evening rush of people who had come and never gone.

“It’s so busy.”

Crouched opposite her, Papageno turned pad and paper toward her.

On the page were hen-scratched words: a holiday?

“Don’t remember.” Elle chewed her lip. The evergreen needles tickled her shoulder.

“You’re having a celebration, too?” cried a woman passing by.

“I’ll celebrate anything.” This voice was young and free. “Hobb’s arrest is just an excuse.”

Elle froze. Hobb; they had captured the Cainite leader. With him gone, the police presence in the city might improve—or become much worse. Then she squelched a groan. The celebrations could last all night. A mere moment would let Papageno slip away, but who knew if they would even get one now?

The second woman spoke again, further down the street now. “Wait ’til they catch that winged fellow, I’ll celebrate twice as hard. I can hardly sleep with him out there.”

Elle’s breath caught.

“Well, I hope it lands on my doorstep. They’ll give you a thousand for him.”

The voices were moving up the street.

“Best hope it doesn’t, missy. Might be the last thing you ever see.”

“Well, you stay safe then, Laurel. I want money.”

The footsteps of the two women faded.

A thousand. Elle glanced at Papageno. He was watching her, too, goggles lit orange by the glass. She could have money, and then it would be her greenhouse again. Her place to live, safe.

Alone.

“You’ll have to stay one more night. But after that, you have to go.” Elle swallowed. “Or we’re both in trouble.”

LLE tugged on the gritty tarp. Beneath, glass clinked. The supply was shrinking, but with no mistakes, it would be just enough to fill the final gaps. A late-night draft blew against her legs, and she rubbed her calves through the canvas pants to keep warm.

“What color?” she murmured, glancing across the greenhouse. Touching the gap were yellow and red, so that left purple and green. She lifted a piece of the green.

A hand fell on her shoulder. Smashed glass, boxing gloves, splinters—

It was only Papageno. Behind him, the greenhouse was a vast black cavern. The stuff that held his hair in tight spikes was coming undone, making tufts stick out, chick-like. He had removed his goggles to sleep, and weary eyes watched her curiously.

“I couldn’t sleep,” Elle said. “So I’m fixing up the windows that broke.”

She tightened her grip on the pane that she’d nearly dropped. She picked up the glass knife and crouched beside the hole in the greenhouse, measuring against it.

Paper rustled. Pen scratched. Papageno held out his notebook.

Why not leave?

“What, and find a real job and house elsewhere?” Her cutter slid across the green. “Because I’m almost done here, that’s why. I’ve nearly fixed everything that he broke.”

Scratch, scratch. Who is he?

“A man used to live here; my father. He liked breaking things. The last thing he ever broke was himself.” She stared into the green glass instead of Papageno. “I’m sick of things that are broken. I want to know I made something. . . whole.” Unable to finish with the glass, Elle leaned it against the side of the greenhouse and rubbed her face. “But now all I do is hide, and my fixing doesn't do any—”

A gloved hand slid forward, holding the headless bird, stopping her spiral.

Elle took the bird. It was heavy and stiff, just cogs and wires now. She got to her feet, slipped past Papageno, and headed to a large tool chest against the shed. At the bottom were four more dead birds, laid out in a neat row.

Papageno observed them silently.

“These are the ones I killed.” The box pressed into her stomach as she leaned down and placed the dead bird beside its brethren. “They weren’t like my bird. I couldn’t make them stop recording.” Slowly she lowered the lid. It tapped shut.

Papageno did not respond.

“What about you?” Elle sighed. “Don’t you have family?”

His eyes dropped to the paper as he scratched away. When he rotated the notebook, the page read: I don’t remember.

“Did they make you forget?”

He looked at the empty page, then scratched away for a while. The paper that he turned to her was full of black cross-outs, leaving only: Anything I was, I’m not anymore. I don’t remember so that I am not sad.

In her pocket, Elle’s fingers rubbed a t-shirt rag. “I think I understand.”

A violin outside began to sing, rasping low into the empty street.

Elle beckoned to Papageno and stepped out into the open. Moonlight through the eaves turned the rows yellow and green, and overhead, the violin warbled and wept. For nearly an hour he played, wavering waltzes and high concertos and flying caprices. Elle and Papageno never spoke, only sat and listened.

Two hours to sunrise, the violin finally cut off. They waited for more, but more never came.

Elle yawned and picked herself up. With a wave, she trudged to the shed. Washing her face, she spotted a shape moving between the bushes.

It was Papageno. Out in the colored moonlight, he was dancing, silently.

LLE looked blearily into the refrigerator. Only one piece of bread remained.

Papageno still slept. The sun was only just up; the factory workers would not arrive for another half hour.

She donned her shoes and coat and collected all the money from the flower stand before hurrying down the street. The cobbles were covered in trash and grime from last night’s festivities. One or two hangovers slept in doorways. But the warm lights of the grocery were on.

On the return journey, she counted up her remaining money. Cash would be tight for the next week, but for now there was bread, and peanut butter, and apples, and that would have to do.

As the cobbles turned to bricks and the greenhouse’s multicolored roof rose out of the workshops, voices floated down the street, speaking in serious tones. Her walk slowed.

At the end of the street, a helmeted policeman questioned two factory workers. Their voices floated toward her.

“Sorry, mate.” One thumbed back his cap. “Haven’t seen any winged man about.”

Elle’s eyes darted toward the greenhouse. It was just blocked by the porch of the next-door workshop. She made for it as the policeman said, “Well, look sharp: a hundred for a lead, a thousand for bringing him in.”

Elle’s fingers caught the doorknob.

“Well! I’ll keep a weather eye out.”

She opened the door.

“Pardon, miss.” The voice did not sound friendly.

Elle turned to the policeman. “Good morning, sir.” She folded her hands over the handles of the grocery bag to hide their shaking.

The policeman stuck his thumbs in his belt, inches from his gun. “Folks heard some strange noises coming from this building. Funny, since it’s recorded to be empty since the owner died last year.”

The ruckus over the bird. Elle’s heart sank. “That’s not true. I’ve owned this place for two years.”

His expression didn’t change. “Should be simple to turn up the deed, then.”

Elle’s heart pounded. “I—I don’t know where it is right now. Could you come back in a few days? I’m sure I’ll turn it up.”

The policeman blinked once. “Tomorrow. Same time.”

“Okay.” Elle fought back tears as she pushed into the greenhouse. The door clicked shut, and she breathed in earth and damp compost and pinched her fingers down the evergreen needles, things that she had labored to create. Things that would soon be taken away.

Papageno rose from the bushes, no goggles, hair fluffed in every direction like a madman’s.

“That was the police,” Elle announced numbly. She lowered the bags to the floor. “They heard all the noise, and they want the deed to prove I own this place. The deed I don’t have.”

Papageno looked at her with sad eyes.

Elle sniffed and whispered, “It’s all ruined.”

Papageno’s eyes dropped to the notebook. His pencil scratched. We’ll steal the deed. Where’s the bank?

“What, break in?” Elle’s eyes burned. “No, no! We’re not stealing anything.”

Her voice echoed. Papageno’s eyes widened, and he patted the air in a shushing motion. His eyes darted toward the door.

“There’s no point in being quiet now! They already know, because you were so loud you brought the police here!” She inhaled. “Just leave.”

He blinked.

“Now, before they come back.”

Something struck the glass from the outside with a slap. Elle ducked. Silhouettes struggled across the window panes, grappling together in the last of the lamplight. Voices grew louder. Someone was wrestled to the ground, and cheers broke out across the street.

“What is that?” Elle crept closer with Papageno behind. They peeked through the crack in the door.

Empty street, then running factory workers.

Elle could still hear someone struggling. Then a shock of black hair wrestled itself into view—black, spiked hair, with shining goggles. Papageno? No, Papageno’s feathers jingled just over her shoulder. This winged man was smaller and thinner, with a cannon mounted to his feathered shoulder. His eyes were different, too.

“Now we have you,” panted the policeman. “Between you and Mr. Hobb, that makes an end of your revolution, doesn’t it?”

The factory workers cheered and exchanged slaps on the back. Sleepy tenants peered from windows and lamplights flicked off as three policemen wrestled the other winged man around the corner, and out of view.

Something behind Elle fell with an echoing crash, and she swung a fist toward the sound. She missed, stumbled, and her elbow shattered the glass door. Pieces of colored light scattered, tinkling around her feet.

“No!”

The noise had come from a fallen rake. She looked to Papageno. The greenhouse was empty. There was no Papageno. It was just her, once again. Her, and the sheet of green glass she had shattered at her feet.

HE rest of the morning was spent clearing things up. It didn’t take long to pack her possessions into two shopping bags, and after that, all she could do was wait. It was the last day. After this, there would be no more days in the greenhouse.

She wandered the rows of plants she had raised and picked one final fistful of flowers, these just for her. She collected the last money from the flower stand and filled the stand with ripe beans and tomatoes, marked with a sign reading free. Then she returned to the greenhouse and ate a sandwich in the open doorway.

It didn’t matter who saw her now.

She stared at the broken glass by the door, but didn’t clear it away. The pieces on the ground were arranged artistically, like a dance.

As the sun set through the open doorway, she brought a broom and dustpan. She looked at the pieces a moment more.

At last, the tears came.

When she’d cried herself out and the sun was all but gone, she set aside the dustpan and brought gloves and wire. The violinist didn’t play that night as she wound wire around each broken piece and suspended them from a tarnished coathanger.

The finished mobile hung twinkling in the shed window as she slept.

LLE made it to the greenhouse door by the second knock. Her grocery-bag possessions rustled at her elbows.

“I know, I’m leaving,” she said to the pants legs showing through the gaps in the glass.

She whisked the door open.

Even without the violin in his hands, she knew the man on the other side.

“Actually,” he said, “I planned to invite you to stay.” His voice was crisp, Italian, his shirt pressed, his curls tousled.

Elle blinked.

“I inherited this place when my uncle died,” he said. “It needed a lot of work, so I was going to sell it, but it seemed someone else was caring for it, someone who cares about the beautiful things. Like Paganini. I should have introduced myself much sooner, but I was enjoying our little mystery.”

“Even more mysterious,” he added, reaching into a pocket, “was this note I found on my balcony.”

The violinist unfolded the torn paper, and Elle recognized with a pang the scratchy handwriting inside.

Police coming tomorrow for deed. Please help the greenhouse girl stay.

“Someone you know?” The violinist looked up at Elle.

“A friend,” she whispered through the lump in her throat.

The violinist tucked this paper away and produced an envelope tucked beneath his arm.

“Do you want to stay? Keep making this place beautiful, and I won’t charge you anything.”

Elle managed a nod.

“Very good,” the violinist said, and shook her numb hand. “Show this to the police.” He handed her a thick sheet of paper. The words Commercial Property Deed peeked out from the fold.

“Thank you,” she managed.

The violinist paused. “No, thank you.”

The first thing Elle did was to show off the deed to the disgruntled police officer who appeared moments later. The second was to drop her bags on her mattress and dig her father’s record player from atop the trash heap.

There was only one record: The Magic Flute.

The record scratched out fuzzy opera as she sat against the wall of the shed that was at last hers, the glass mobile winking colored light onto her pad as she drew up plans.

The house needed more flowers, more beans, a bigger vegetable patch. Maybe one day, she could even build. For now, the glass could wait.

She sat back and watched the mobile twist and glitter in the sunlight pouring in through the open door. The air smelled fresh. If she waited long enough, perhaps she might hear the tinkle of metal feathers again. And until then, she would work to make the broken glass house into a place worth returning to.