LITMIR.BIZ

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had hair that could grow as long as Luisa’s, she’d take care of it. She sniffed herself again. Maybe she did smell.

      She pressed her finger into Natasha’s cheek. The kid didn’t move. She was asleep. Mimi turned and looked at Andrew, sitting below them on the grass beside the pen. Probably telling stories to the pigs again. Mimi had no interest in his stories. She was much more interested in the situation among the grown-ups. The new one? There was never anyone new on the island. But that wasn’t right. Eddie had been new, and that was just days ago. Or maybe weeks. It was so hard to keep track of time. Stop thinking about him, she whispered to herself. Just stop. She thought instead about how the grown-ups came and went from the island. Maybe there was a dock somewhere, a private landing for a yacht, or a seaplane, or even a rowboat. Maybe there was a magic door in their villa that opened to Paris, or Rome, or Bombay. Maybe the rules were entirely different for the grown-ups. She said this out loud and Luisa, jarred out of her sulk, laughed: of course the rules were different. If there was anything they could be sure of, it was that the grownups’ world was entirely different from their own. Maybe the island wasn’t an island at all, and only the grown-ups could see land where the ocean was. Maybe the grown-ups could walk on water. Maybe the grown-ups turned into birds at night and flew away.

      Natasha’s breathing evened out and turned into a kind of purring sound, and she kneaded her thumb inside her fist like a kitten kneads its paws.

      Mimi sighed. Her legs were cramping. She decided to risk it and pick up the sleeping child. Natasha’s curly head collapsed against Mimi’s shoulder. Her breath was wet on Mimi’s skin, her whole body silky with sleep. Mimi carried her down to the hut, pried the door open with her foot, and laid her down on a mat. She pushed the curls off the kid’s forehead and pulled a blanket up to her chin. Then she went back outside, and climbed back up the hill, and flopped down again next to Luisa. She could see that Luisa had been crying while she was gone, but she seemed to have gotten over it. Mimi poked her. Luisa shrugged and poked her back.

      Mimi could hear Andrew humming, and she could see him sitting with his back to a tree. She saw a single cloud in the sky, drifting toward the sun in a lazy way. And she saw a ship edging its way along the horizon.

      “I don’t know how many grown-ups there are,” Luisa said. “The most I ever count is five, maybe six, but the ones I count are always different. I’m not sure I’ve ever seen them all together. Sometimes it’s hard for me to see things.”

      “When they had us in that net, I tried to count but it was hard to keep track of them. They all pretty much look the same. Or anyway they act the same. I don’t know.” Mimi was shading her eyes to watch the ship. It was far away, but even far away they could see that it was beaten up, a rusting cargo ship probably. It belched dark smoke that pointed to oil burning. “What do you think it’s going to drop?” she said.

      “Broken mirrors?” Luisa said. “DVDs? Old furniture? Could be anything.”

      “I wish sometimes they narrowed the possibilities,” Mimi said. “I’d like to have a sense of what’s ahead.”

      “It’ll never happen,” Luisa said. “There’s too much stuff to throw away.”

      Down below, Andrew stood up from where he was sitting by the pigs. He stretched and walked to the hut. They watched him yawn as he ducked down to enter through the door. When he stepped inside, the island looked so perfect in his absence that they could easily imagine he had never existed at all.

      What came, came in a net. It was pretty ordinary stuff, actually, if you can call a net glowing with nuclear waste ordinary. They tried to wake Andrew up, but once he fell asleep he stayed asleep for hours. It was always that way with him. Mimi and Luisa ended up hauling the entire load up onto the grass on their own. The bricks were made of blue glass and were heavy, and neither girl wanted to touch them. They wrapped their hands around the net’s soggy cords and dragged the load across the ground instead of even trying to pick it up.

      The glow faded on each brick as it emerged from the water. The lone cloud wandered across the sky like a sleepwalking sheep and then snapped suddenly across the sun. The pigs woke up. The girls felt suddenly nauseous and each hoisted a corner of the net onto her shoulder and together they pulled it up the path. They hated Andrew for taking a nap when they obviously could have used his help. “Isn’t it interesting how he’s always asleep when we need him most,” Mimi murmured under her breath, and Luisa nodded.

      Even with the sun behind a cloud and the whole earth in shadow, the island radiated heat. It was a dry place. It hardly ever rained there. The landscape was entirely Mediterranean, rocky and scrubby and filled with flowers that miraculously grew out of unwatered soil and rock.

      At the fence, there was the whole question of how to get the waste over it to the pigs. Would they have to touch it? Each girl turned away and vomited discreetly. Mimi reached up and pulled a small chunk of hair from her head. Should they throw each brick one by one, or should they hoist the entire net up and over? Luisa said one by one, and she loosened the net and shut her eyes and grabbed a brick but it was hot to the touch and she screamed and dropped it and it landed on her foot. The pigs were pushing more than eagerly against the fence. Mimi wrapped her hands in fabric and bent down low and placed them on either side of a brick, and lifted it by straightening her legs. She threw it high into the air. The spotted pig jumped. It opened its mouth and the brick disappeared. It was like a seal at the zoo, if Mimi had ever been to a zoo. She didn’t think she had. But she knew what she was looking at. She grabbed another, and tossed it high as well. Now two pigs jumped together. They knocked heads mid air, but they kept their mouths open, and the one with the lopped off ear slurped the brick down whole.

      There was a frenzy now among the pigs. The girls couldn’t throw the bricks fast enough. The air was silvery with shattered glass, but the mass in the net seemed to stay the same size. A single brick leaving made no difference at all. The girls slung brick after glowing brick. Their arms were getting tired and their hands, missing fingers, were not as dexterous as they might have been. The pigs were practically screaming.

      “We’re going to have to lift them all,” Mimi said.

      “Should we try to wake up Andrew?” Luisa said. “I don’t think we can do this alone.” A chunk of her hair fell out, too.

      Mimi looked over her shoulder. It seemed crazy that he could still be asleep, but where else would he be? Even Natasha should be awake by now. They were supposed to work together. That was how they were supposed to get through all this. Small body next to small body could add up to strength. It always had. What were they if they couldn’t count on each other? Was it possible that Andrew and Natasha were awake inside and just too lazy to get up and help? She shook her head. You couldn’t trust those smelly children, she thought, those lazy children—all they wanted to do was sleep. And then she caught herself. In her mind she sounded just like the grown-ups.

      “We’ll have to get underneath it,” Luisa said. “We’ll push it up, and then we’ll tip it in.”

      They shoved the net as close to the fence as they dared, then started heaving the bricks from the bottom up toward the top of the posts. But every time they pushed one spot up, the mass turned liquid, and the bricks tumbled to the ground in the spot they’d left vacant. The pigs were panting and squealing and rushing back and forth. Mimi’s shoulders ached and her hands throbbed and she could barely breathe from the fear of inhaling radiation deep inside her body. She pushed and pushed and pushed, and then she felt wood.

      She was right up next to the fence. Her foot was pressed against the post. Her foot. No shoes. The lop-eared pig approached like lightning, teeth bared. She jumped back. She stood up straight; her feet scooted behind her, her body balanced by her head in the net. And that was the tipping point. The net fell, bricks cascading like blue water, over the fence, into the pen, right into the jaws of the frenzied pigs.

      Later, sitting on the hill, picking shards of glass out of their hair, the girls tried not to think about how long some garbage lasted. Mimi held her foot in her hand and counted her five whole toes over and over.

      “I was dreaming,” Andrew said, climbing sleepily

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