A tiny figurine launched across a restaurant dining room when an elastic ear strap of a woman’s coronavirus face mask sprung one of her earrings. The woman removing the mask was unaware she had lost an earring. But the tiny plastic figure molded in a swan dive began to awaken in midair as though from a deep sleep.

        The tiny flier’s neck, arms, and legs began to tingle aloft in the savory air of the restaurant; for the first time she sensed independent fingers and toes. These new sensations spread through her body in delicious waves. Bending her neck to look down at herself for the first time she was delighted to see her own arms and legs: molded in plastic she had known only the backs of her hands and wrists. The elastic ear strap not only shot her in the air but sprung her free of the earring’s through-body wire. She was now her own graceful emancipated body in flight.

        The tiny flier confirmed that her creator had made her in the image of her beautiful twin, molded in a swan dive in a navy blue tank suit and a white bathing cap, her chin thrust forward, back arched, legs together and arms swept back. She always had assumed this was so because nearly all the earrings they knew were identical twins. She wondered what happened to her twin. She must be still on the Mistress’s other ear. When she and her twin were working, their positions on opposite sides of the Mistress’s head prevented them from seeing each other’s act; between shows they lay front to back, speechless and motionless in a dressing room crowded with other earrings waiting to go on. Occasionally, the Mistress left them alone together in sunlight on a marble counter or dresser top if she was in a hurry. Now sunlight poured through an open door. The tiny flier coasted on air, beckoned by a free world. 

        It was nice to get away from the other earrings, a colorful jumble of paired objects curious to look at but unable to move or communicate as she was now. It was a joy to feel alive. Words scarcely capture the pleasure she now felt, borne lightly on air as sensation flooded into her beautiful body. She was an earring-errant become a living being! 

        Place settings and food on tables edged with diners passed below as one might see fields and farms from an airplane window, things she had seen from the Mistress’s ear. She and her twin had been many places with the Mistress in the past but, freed now from the Mistress’s ear, she was alive to the joy of being in her own new places. Her high spirits, light weight, and the restaurant’s warm draughts kept her closer to the ceiling than the floor, unsurprised by her freestyling body and unafraid of falling. But she could not glide about the dining room forever luxuriating in her new freedom. She began to wonder where to touch down in this strange new world. The door to a new life had opened but the restaurant doors were closed: She needed to consider her options. A shelf over the restaurant bar offered a vantage.

        From her aerie, the tiny flier spied her now-former Mistress at a table in lively conversation with several women. She saw her poor twin still on the Mistress’s left ear, jiggling with her every gesture. “If only I could rescue her!” the tiny flier thought. “What a relief it is, not being shaken about like that anymore!” She saw one of the women at the table put a finger on her own right ear and then point to the Mistress’s right. Everyone at the table saw that the Mistress was missing an earring. The Mistress removed the empty hook from her right ear and the tiny flier’s twin from her left and set them on the table. The women briefly looked around the table and on the floor nearby for the earring’s mate and then resumed their conversation. Someone said something with a raised index finger: The Mistress nodded and put the unmated earring and empty hook in her handbag.

        The tiny flier’s first thought was that this could foreclose rescuing her twin. It reminded her how ill-prepared she was to exist in this world as anything besides a former static earring figurine depicting a woman diver performing a swan dive. But that was then: Now she was alive. The Mistress’s friends were clothed and wore shoes; the tiny flier knew from spending time in the Mistress’s handbag that it was filled with things giants use all day. In contrast, the tiny flier was less than two inches tall, with nothing more to her name than a tank suit and bathing cap; the only times she and her twin broke the surface of a pool were on those rare occasions when the Mistress went swimming and left them on her ears. The tiny flier loved the feeling of gliding through the dining room, watching the life below but she also realized that everyday tasks in the giant world such as passing through the two doors between the restaurant and the outside raised monumental obstacles for her. Perhaps her first step into this new world would be to complete the action her maker had made her to fulfill.

        “Now that I can move my body, the most direct way back into the Mistress’s handbag to rescue my twin may be to make my dive at last. The tall glasses with clear liquid look like my best bet. I’d have to dive in when no one was looking, get out quickly and slip into the Mistress’s handbag. If only I could get to my twin and free her of the through-body wire, she too could start to feel and think and talk and we could make an escape plan together.”

        The Mistress stood up from the table; her tablemates closed their circle of conversation on a woman at the other end of the table. The tiny flier watched the Mistress leave the table and enter a doorway at the back of the dining room. No one was looking: Now was the moment. She stretched her arms squeezing her fists, did a prim squat, and stood up straight with her shoulders squared. She took two steps to the ledge and drew a deep breath as she put her arms together over her head. She leaned forward, rising on the balls of her feet, and launched herself into flight. She rounded the room once more, a swan, and glided toward the Mistress’s table. She banked a neat circle above the tall glass with clear liquid to the top, nearest to where the Mistress was sitting. She found her point and knifed into the liquid with less than a small splash. 

        Her dive took her halfway into the glass. Ooh! The liquid was bracingly cold! When she flutter-kicked to the lip of the glass for a breath, the tabletop looked farther down than she imagined. But the Mistress had crumpled her napkin on the table close to the base of the glass. The tiny flier checked to make sure no one had seen her. She pulled herself over the lip of the glass and tumbled into a soft landing in the napkin. Still no one at the table seemed to look her way. The napkin helped her dry off but she had little time to think about her next steps before the Mistress reappeared, hung her bag on the back of the chair, and sat down.

        Thinking quickly under the napkin, the tiny flier assumed her swan dive pose moments before the Mistress picked up the napkin and found her missing earring. The Mistress took the other earring from her handbag to make sure the one under the napkin was the missing mate. She and her tablemates couldn’t believe that they missed the tiny swan diver right under their noses when they looked earlier. They passed the pair around.

        “What precious little dolls!” said one of the women. 

       “Vintage collector’s items!” said another. 

        “Odd: One of them felt a little wet to me,” said a third. 

“Well, finding the missing mate is a huge relief, huge,” the Mistress said, putting them in her handbag. “I can’t wait to get them fixed. I just love these earrings.” 

        “There’s only one place in New York for that,” their waiter said. “Village Vintage Vinyl on Christopher Street. It’s a record shop upstairs with a jewelry workshop downstairs. They do excellent work and they don’t charge an arm and a leg.”

        The tiny flier meanwhile was having a tough go of it in the Mistress’s bag. She had been there before but never freely crawled through it and had no idea how difficult this would be, especially in a damp bathing suit with bare arms, legs, and feet. This brought home once more how challenging it would be to navigate the giant world, how unready she was for freedom. She was not going to get far in a tank suit, bathing cap, and bare feet. She was relieved at last to find her twin but disappointed to embrace a molded plastic figure whose waxy face had nothing more for her than lustreless velvet eyes and stiff ruby-red lips. “I’ll get you out of here,” the tiny flier promised, but the through-body wire attaching her twin to the earring hook was beyond her strength to budge. “We’ll think of something,” she said. 

 

II 
 

At home that evening, the tiny flier was relieved when the Mistress at last turned out the lights. She could stop spooning awkwardly with her stiff, gull-winged twin, as the Mistress had left them on the dresser top, and start to plan their escape. She was sure that the key to reviving and freeing her twin was to remove the through-body wire. But the tools on the dresser top were giant-sized. A nail file with a narrow end looked promising but was heavy to lift; she could engage the wire loop, but even after she wedged her twin where she could get purchase on it, it was too tough to budge. And then she tried using the nail file to saw the wire, exhausting work that made little progress. This was going to be tougher than she thought. 

        The tiny flier put the file back where she had found it and returned her rigid twin to where the Mistress had left them. She sat down next to her and told her about her amazing day, the flight in the restaurant, everything she saw and felt, and then how she got back.

        “If only we could get you free so you could talk!” she said. “Having feeling and being able to move my body is wonderful! Flying is breathtaking! You’d love it! But the most amazing thing of all was completing my swan dive. How strange that we were fashioned in this graceful pose for an action we should never complete, only to hang from a giant’s ear. But I did it. I made my dive. It was perfect. Diving into the cold liquid gave me the most delicious feeling of all in a day of delightful sensations. It awakened me to limitless possibilities. I feel more aware of things now and know things too, things that have been coming back to me all day that I never felt or thought of before or even thought I knew. I wish so much that we could get that wire out of you so you could do it too!” 

        But the tiny flier’s first exciting day at last caught up to her. Her fatigue intensified when she considered her twin’s rigid plastic figure whose waxy face had nothing more for her than lustreless velvet eyes and stiff ruby-red lips. She repositioned her mate and herself as the Mistress had left them, spooning with their backs arched, legs together and arms swept back, and fell asleep. 

        The next morning when the Mistress went to put her swan diver earrings in a box to take to the repair shop, she thought the diver in back had her arms around the front diver. But looking again through reading glasses, she saw that they were exactly as she had left them. She smiled and shook her head, closed the box, and later gave it to an administrative assistant to run to the repair shop.
 

III 
 

        Village Vintage Vinyl on Christopher Street was a longtime neighborhood landmark, a storefront record shop with an annex upstairs and a watch and jewelry repair shop in the basement. The record shop was a wonderland for cognoscenti of the American songbook. Although the names and titles on old record jackets in the shop were obscure to many music browsers, one of the many pleasures of being there was that nearly all the simple airs and melodies one heard were easy to recognize as originals or early versions of what rock music later made blockbuster hits. But the basement workshop was closed to the public. Those who needed watches, jewelry, or other small items repaired went to an industrial elevator which, when called, opened to a glass counter with a repairman who always reflected the customer. Customers saw the same repairman each time they brought something to be fixed but noticed different repairmen with other customers if they happened to be in the record shop for other reasons, such as listening to music or browsing records. This, along with the extra time it often took to finish jobs, suggested to customers that the workshop was a busy place filled with workers. However, the Master was the sole repairman. 

        The Master owned the building and the record shop. He knew that customers were most comfortable with people who look like them. A man of many aspects, he made a virtue and practice of his customers’ preferences.

        The Black administrative assistant who brought in the Mistress’s earrings had a laugh back and forth with the old Black man behind the counter about the two little white ladies diving off the big white lady’s ears. “Ten dollars,” the man said. “Tell her they be good as new in two weeks.” The man handed her a receipt.

        When the Master rode the elevator back to his workshop, he took a closer look at the figurines in the box. He thought he saw one move; she moved when he looked again. “Well what have we got here?” he said softly to himself. “It’s been a spell since one of these turned up.” He spoke to himself under his breath because he knew from experience that the human voice was too loud for tiny ears to register more than unpleasant thundering reverberations. 

        The tiny flier looked up from the box at a man who looked like a grandfather. She was aware that he saw her move but he did not appear to be a threat. She could see his lips move but could not hear what he was saying.

In his workshop, the Master gently placed the tiny woman under a glass globe he had adapted with a stethoscope to hear the voices of tiny people. He put the stethoscope eartips in his ears and gestured for her to put her hands on the side of the globe so she could hear his voice through vibrations on the glass.

        “Hello, Little One. I am the Master. Welcome to my workshop.” 

        “Hello, Grandfather. The only thing I know for sure is that not long ago I was part of an earring; I slipped my hook, became an earring-errant, and now seem to be a tiny living person.”
        “An earring-errant: I like that.” 

She told the Master the dramatic circumstances of her metamorphosis, from having an elastic ear strap launch her from the Mistress’s earlobe into the restaurant, to flying around the dining room, to diving into the tall glass of cold water to try to get back into the Mistress’s handbag to rescue her twin, and the aftermath. 

        “You’ve had some adventure!” 

        “I’m not sure what I should do or where to go next.” 

        “You are safe here with me.” 

        “Can you take the wire out of my twin so she can feel and move and talk with me?” The Master put the tiny person’s twin where she could watch him work.
        She saw him carefully snip and remove her twin’s through-body wire and then gently rub her tiny body, arms, and legs with his fingers and thumbs, but her twin kept her rigid form.
        “I’m afraid removing the wire makes no difference, Little One. She may look exactly like you but I don’t think there’s more here than a plastic figurine. I’ll use her to make a mold so I can return a matching set to the customer and let you keep her for company. But I don’t expect her to come to life and you shouldn’t either.” 

        “Ok.” 

        “The good news though is that this isn’t the first time I’ve seen a plastic figurine that turned into a little person, an earring-errant as you call yourself, though you are the first to come from an earring. None of the others are here now. But I have a place for you and even some clothing and other things you might find useful. You may stay for as long as you like.” 

        “Ok.” 

        The Master raised the globe, picked up the tiny flier and placed her on the threshold of a small, simply furnished dwelling. Inside was a neatly made bed with the top sheet and blanket invitingly turned back and a nightgown laid out. It felt good to take off her tank suit for the first time and she was surprised to see rich red hair pile out when she removed her rubber bathing cap. Her skin breathed lightly under the nightgown; she got into bed and fell right away into a deep sleep. 

IV 
 

        The tiny flier slept for a month. Her long repose let her newly developing mind sift through and order her memory in a series of dreams such that she awoke with a name, Marian Morgenstern, and a legend, a provisional sequence of stories that constituted her life. She had dreamed about her twin as a living sister and was sure that they had spoken but could not remember her name or what they talked about. Her former existence as a diver and tiny flier sublimed into the recesses of her memory. Looking around the room after she awoke, she recognized a picture on the wall of a clapboard farmhouse with a wood-framed screen door. Then she remembered that she was a guest in the Master’s workshop. When she got out of bed, she found a plain square shirt and trousers and a rough pair of sandals. They were a good fit when she tried them on and felt a lot more comfortable than they looked.

        Seeing his guest awake, the Master was glad she had on the clothes he had laid out. He served her a tiny cup of tea and whole wheat bread crumbs which to her were as large as biscuits. When she finished, he took her to his worktable to show her the earrings. Her mate was there, still lifeless with a hole where her wire had been, along with the new pair of copies he just finished painting. The Master noticed that his earring-errant had grown larger than her former mate during her month-long sleep. 

        He knew of five plastic figurines which had come to life. The first died not long after he found it. The second grew to human size and now managed the record shop upstairs, an assimilated New Yorker with no trace of his origin. The cat got the third. The fourth adapted to the dollhouse scale and appeared to live there happily for 10 years until he died. The fifth grew to human size, worked at the record shop, got romantically involved with the manager, and then went to the West Coast after they broke up.

        The Master put his guest under the glass globe again in order to discuss with her what would happen next. 

        Marian was reassured when she felt the Master’s calm, modulated voice once more through vibrations on the glass. She thanked him for his help and hospitality.

        The Master was surprised when Marian told him her name: “This one’s a quick starter,” he thought.

Marian said she had slept well and thanked the Master for the clothes. She was surprised when he said that she had slept for a month. He showed Marian her now smaller inert former mate, a plastic figurine posed in a swan dive with a painted-on navy blue tank suit and white bathing cap. He said that he had used her to model a new set of figurines for the customer’s earrings and a spare set. Marian listened politely. The space her new consciousness had opened up increased the distance that separated her from an inanimate past which she could imagine now more easily than precisely remember. She told the Master that “the diving figure” reminded her of her grandmother, a former champion diver. He smiled and nodded. He told Marian not to worry if she felt herself getting bigger. Growth is natural; some subjects grow to human size and become part of that world; each grows to the size for which they naturally are adapted.

        The Master cautioned Marian that the shop upstairs had a cat to keep rodents away. Marian said she knew what a cat was but never had seen a rodent. The Master said the cat seldom came down to the workshop; he assured her that no animal could get into her living quarters, only to be aware of the potential danger. Marian later saw the record shop’s tortoiseshell orange cat when she went upstairs with the Master in the elevator. She was hidden in a blind the Master built into his shop counter so she could observe people in the record shop unseen. In time, she would entertain the Master with diminutive dead-on impressions of certain customers. She also watched movies. She was awakened late one night by something that made a strange spitting sound and saw yellow eyes in her bedroom skylight. Thinking quickly, she struck a safety match that scared the cat away.

        In observing his subjects, the Master conjectured a comparatively rapid evolutionary process in which the DNA of tiny people’s cells was rewritten and replaced by successively larger cells that fostered their gradually increasing sizes. This theory included an observed psychological corollary by which each subject’s awareness and memory appeared limited to their current size. This explained to him why each of them assimilated an individual identity and legend as it developed, but none appeared to retain a memory of having metamorphosed from a plastic figurine to a living creature, nor even earlier stages of their growth to human size. They appeared not to begin to age until they attained their full physical size.

        The Master was sure that Marian was special, the best of the six he had known. He looked forward to the day she would come into her own. Her two predecessors entered the everyday world through the record shop: One was still there, the other had moved on. The Master expected Marian to start at the record shop too, but the better he got to know her, the surer he was that she would advance beyond it. She grew to human size more quickly than the others and proved more adept at absorbing human knowledge and experience. The Master thought her more aware of her setting and circumstances at each growth stage than the others had been. What puzzled him was that at each stage, Marian seemed as though to rediscover him, her only companion, as a stranger, such that they were reacquainted anew. To Marian, the Master was a succession of individuals she knew as "Grandfather," each unique to her in his own time.

        She learned from observing the Master the ability to divine, absorb, and reflect the better qualities of people she met as though they were looking in a mirror. When she became part of the human world, this often made people feel as though they knew her right away, always had known her, and love her. Where two of the Master’s five other subjects had grown into distinct, human-like personalities, Marian was different. The Master sometimes mused that Marian was less a personality than an avatar.

V 
 

        Shortly before Marian began work at the record shop, she dreamt that she was with a full-sized plastic model of herself in a tank suit and swim cap, molded performing a swan dive with a metal wire through a hole in her center. Marian knew in the dream that she had to remove the wire. She found a pair of snips so big she needed both arms to carry them, but her arms were not strong enough to make the snips cut the wire. She closed their jaws on the wire, placed one of its arms on the ground and threw all her weight on the top arm. This gashed the wire but did not cut through it. She reset the snips in the same place, though this time with the wire deep in its jaws, and once more threw all her weight on the snips’s top arm. She tumbled with the snips when they cut through the wire. She picked herself up and pulled the wire from the model. She massaged the model’s hands and arms, feet and legs. She rubbed the stiff plastic neck with her fingers and then kneaded it with the heels of her hands as though massaging it. She sensed warmth. The plastic seams began to smoothen. The model’s arms and legs started to relax. The hole through her center disappeared. Her velvet irises softened with light and her lips parted. Marian found herself looking into her own face.

        The model sat up and asked: “Where am I?” 

        “You’re free,” Marian said. “You can be anything you want now.” 

        “Yes, but where am I and what am I doing here? And who are you?” 

        “You are home; you are free. You can be anything you want to be,” Marian awoke saying to herself. 

        The dream surprised her. It felt like a good omen before starting something new in her life. She had not realized that it took her seven years to evolve to human size in her grandfather’s workshop. She had spent her time well, reading, learning skills, and gradually increasing her exposure to the world beyond to understand its ways.

        The Master tried not to show his surprise watching Marian’s lovely, animated face as she shared her dream with him. This was the first time that she had intimated a sense of her past. It was the first time any of his miniatures come to life had revealed the least inkling of an origin or even prior growth stages.

        “That was quite a dream!”

        “Wasn’t it though! And it reassures me about going to work upstairs!” 

        “Good for you! You’ve always been free to do what you want here and now you seem ready. Where do you imagine those details come from: The mannequin of yourself in a bathing suit, the wire you had to cut, the giant snippers? Maybe you read about it somewhere or saw it in a movie?” 

        “No idea. I don’t think it was anything I read or saw. What surprises me is that I wasn’t surprised that the woman in the dream looked exactly like me. My grandmother was a champion diver. Maybe I was going back to one of my grandmother’s stories.” 

       “Could be,” he said. This unexpected turn caught the Master off guard. He thought it best in the circumstances to say nothing until he had thought it through carefully. Life went on as before and Marian seemed so happy once she started at the record shop that the Master thought it better to not to say anything that might interrupt or disturb her progress.

VI 
 

        Marian was a natural fit with the record shop as she would have been for any small business. In addition to charming customers by reflecting their better qualities, in no time at all she had the shop’s entire catalog in her head: She knew artists, first lines and melodies, and exactly where to find each item. The Master had taught her to organize things she wanted to remember as items in a house: An exemplary pupil, Marian’s music house was better organized and cross-referenced than a digital database.

        It was while working at the record shop that Marian met the film director who cast her in a movie that made her a star and also married her. The film director came to Village Vintage Vinyl when he was in town because its offerings were an inspiration and resource for his work. His roots were in the Midwest, his films primarily set there and on the west coast. The information in Marian’s head was essential to his work and Marian became essential to his life. 

        Before Marian married the film director, the Master once more considered telling her about her origin. By then, she had her own apartment and social set. Although she still worked at the record shop and remained close to the Master, she spent less time there as she got better used to friends whose lifestyles and mannerisms she was absorbing. One day in the Master’s workshop, the Master told her to pick out something as a keepsake.

        “A keepsake! You know I’ll always come back to see you, Grandfather.”
        “I hope so, Marian. I only thought you might like to have something from the shop.” Scanning the cluttered workshop, her eyes fell on a pair of miniature women divers.
        “These are lovely. What are they for?”

        “Someone long ago ordered earrings. I had a mold and thought they would be perfect.”
        “For earrings? I guess. They’re nice enough as a pair of graceful swan divers. I’d love to have them just as they are.” 

        The Master was pleased that Marian picked these figures. He told himself that she solved his dilemma by selecting a potential key to her origin story without his meddling, a story that she may never need to know because she was getting on so well with the life she was making.

VII
 

         Movie audiences could not get enough of Marian Morgenstern. But to many directors, other actors, and critics she was a cipher. She was an ordinary good-looking person in a place and industry where ordinary good-looking people are the given. She was an ordinary actor, unusual only in that she did exactly what directors told her to do on movie sets. But the film developing bath as though washed away everything ordinary about Marian Morgenstern. In role after role, she was transformed on screen into an unearthly creature who fascinated filmgoers into believing they knew everything about her. 

        Marian reflected a beautiful life in beautiful surroundings among beautiful people during a beautiful time. She and the film director had no children but a long and faithful partnership and many social acquaintances. Though all her life Marian never stopped longing for a union with her secret sharer, a figure she knew in dreams from the sensation of its warm embrace. She assumed that this was a woman: In the stages of awakening, individual physical details receded into the shadows as Marian became more conscious, leaving her only the sensation of holding and being held by a warm physical body, more a shadow than a sister or an intimate friend. Marian had known this figure all her life but reading and reflection persuaded her that attempts to embody her secret sharer would be to attach her own preferences to something that inhabited her subconscious as an independent entity. 

        Marian appeared in movies for 20 years; she then retired to garden and entertain, and to travel with the film director when he was between projects. She was beloved by millions but slipped from the public mind as she had from its eye, fondly remembered without scandal or regret. Marian gave the Master’s pair of swan divers to one of her husband’s nieces. She and the film director occasionally visited New York, but she never again returned to Village Vintage Vinyl or saw the Master.

 

VIII
 

         A well-preserved elderly woman in pajamas and a thick bathrobe lay on a chaise lounge on the observation deck of a mountain spa. She liked to admire a prominent peak in the azure twilight and wait for the shooting stars. She leaned back her head for a moment, closed her outer eyes and let inner eyes lead her into a reverie where she was padding along a corridor lined with different-colored doors. She knew this place. Her grandfather had taught her to memorize things by putting them away in a house. She had begun with a clapboard farmhouse because it looked appealing in a picture that her mind’s eye could still see: Its homely rooms, cupboards, drawers, and shelves made things easy to find. But the farmhouse was too small for the many new things she wanted to collect as she got older. She designed a new, larger structure nearby. It was unappealing from the outside but this made no difference because no one besides her could see it and there was enough room inside for everything she wanted to keep. She wondered if she still could find the farmhouse in the picture.

        Every corner of that farmhouse was as real to her as any place she had lived and, in a sense, she had lived there. Walking through the new structure, she was sure that memory would guide her back to it. A feature of the new structure was that stairs between the corridors appeared to go both up and down simultaneously; when she told herself she had to go down, she remembered that stairs are man-made to convey people to where they want to go, regardless of whichever direction they appear to take. She was certain that she would find the farmhouse if she could get to the ground level. A door at the bottom of a stairwell opened outside to a yard. Across the yard was the farmhouse exactly as she remembered it. It was magical to cross the yard to its threshold, to hear the screen door bang behind her on the way to her old room. She found in a dresser drawer a neatly folded navy blue tank suit and white bathing cap. Putting them on made her once again the tiny flier in a world in which she never belonged, her fancy a long flight drawing now to an end. 

        Her outer eyes reopened on stars which sailed into view as a band from left to right, leading toward the mountain peak in the azure twilight. Her bathrobe fell to the deck as she rose in the tank suit and bathing cap. She stretched her arms squeezing her fists; she did a prim squat and stood up straight with her shoulders squared. Her eyes followed the last star. She took two steps to the edge of the observation deck. She drew a deep breath as she put her arms together over her head. She leaned forward, rising on the balls of her feet, and launched herself after the last star. Once more a swan, she followed the stars to the mountain peak. As they began to ascend the peak, the earring-errant broke to the right. She found her point and banked above a mountain pool. The moment before she broke the surface she met her secret sharer’s still young face looking into her own, velvet irises softening with light and lips parted.

        She knifed into the pool with less than a small splash.