Most nine-year-olds don’t roam the streets at night, but Nadinha Rosario did. Tonight the orange streetlamps were like submarine headlights in cold, brackish water and the air smelled of pine needles and dust. She passed a rusty GrillMaster on its side, a pile of cigarette boxes with horrific warning labels, a log cabin with wooden sculptures in the front yard: stern gnomes and pensive ferrets and wicked gargoyles. She saw no one.

She turned off the road, into the woods, and glided between trees whose warts and gnarls held in their constellation the secrets of eons long passed, written in a language she could not read. Her skin shone like wet mud in the moonlight. She pushed past ferns and nightbrush into a meadow. Speckled with milkdrops and marred by thin clouds, the tar-black void hung above her. 

And there was a rustle. 

It happened very slowly. Like an accordion unfolding, a creature rose from behind a bush. It was white as porcelain and freakishly tall, its teeth like wooden manicure sticks. Something black and sweet-smelling dripped from its lips. It smiled at her, and there was nothing malicious in its smile. It held out a bony hand and in its palm was a deck of cards that looked centuries old, their edges peeling like the skin at the base of Nadinha’s fingernails. 

She was not afraid. She dreamed sometimes of strange creatures finding her in the night, and they were never bad dreams. 

It gestured with its hand. Though the cards weren’t spread, Nadinha knew what to do. She reached in and pulled out a card. King of Spades. Though it was hard to make out the expression, the card looked sad, like it had something it wished it could tell her but knew it couldn’t. 

The creature smiled bigger and pulled back its hand. Smoke came from the corners of the deck and a crackling noise came from inside the cards, like wood being snapped and split. Raw embers began to glow in the deck. Flames shot up and the cards curled like black butterflies and disintegrated, spiraling to the ground like twirling seed pods until the creature’s hand held only ashes. It wiggled its fingers and they fell to the ground like crumbs. 

The creature looked Nadinha right in the eyes, eager. Then it looked down by its feet. In the grass there was a message written in ashes and burnt paper: KH.

Nadinha giggled and bounced. The creature’s face widened and deepened and it honked and tittered, its eyes tight with glee. Something sharp in it had softened. It looked at her and seemed to be thinking, then reached for the bush it had emerged from and one by one picked dark berries from inside. They glistened in the dark and it held some out to her with its popsicle stick-like fingers. She took a few, not thinking, and put them in her mouth, and they were harsh and bitter and she nearly spat them out. But they were sweet too, and the creature seemed to like them. Their dark juice dribbled down its chin and she felt it on hers too.

As they chewed shadows rose around them. More creatures. They emerged from behind shrubs and peered around trees, smiles on their china faces. They formed a ring of sorts. There was a glassiness in their eyes that wasn’t there in the first creature’s. The way they moved was stiffer. Each held a deck of cards, ready to impress her.

The first creature looked to the others and let out a series of guttural ribbits. They responded in squeaks and guffaws. This went on for a few minutes, strange auditory hieroglyphics spinning to and fro past Nadinha’s ears like lyres from a land too foreign to name. Then the conversation quieted down a bit, and the creatures turned to look at her.

She smiled, expecting some delightful trick. In unison they raised their hands to their heads and gripped their faces between the forehead and ears. Then they squeezed. 

Their heads squished like rubber between their fingers and their eyes popped out like corks from bottles, caught and yanked back four or five feet out by strings of sinewy nervous tissue attached to the backs of eyes like the hooks that lock wrecking balls onto their chains. Everything was still for a moment, then the creatures began clawing aimlessly at their empty sockets, walking in little circles, feeling at the strings coming out of their skulls. They wailed in pain and confusion. Some began shrieking. Then everything stopped. 

The creatures retracted their eyes like they were reeling in fish and stood, smiling, like nothing had happened.

A part of Nadinha wanted to laugh at their hysterical prank. But when she tried it came out sounding more like a scream, and before she knew it she was running along asphalt, not looking back. She kicked up a cloud of pebbles and dirt and her lungs felt like forest fires.

#

They walked past the same things she had seen last night. The girl asked how pale the skin of the creatures was and Nadinha pulled on her lower eyelid, showing the milky bottom of her eye. As they stepped through the brush there was a gentle cascade of pops and creaks, snapping twigs and rustling leaves. Hanging branches split the sky into a thousand tiny triangles. 

The clearing was filled with moonlight like a pond. The creatures stood in a circle. Their eyes were closed, their faces solemn dinnerplates. Black as ink, berryflesh dripped from their chins. Their long bodies were the color of the inside of a fishstick.

After a while, the creatures began to sway, then to hum. In the sound was the dark of chocolate, the curled-up texture of blackburnt metal, the flicker of wings on flying things, the eyes of the silent thing, the eyes of the world. The humming grew and the faces of the creatures began to open. Like pale magnolias blooming and giving way to cruor, deep red and pink unfolded. The innards of the creatures were moist and hot, steaming in the chill air, crinkled like the face of someone weeping. Their open faces were like carnivorous flowers with meaty tongues for petals, and their hums turned to moans. 

The way Nadinha remembers it, the creatures moaned for hours. For a time her and the girl were in a trance. They were not themselves. They were not anybody. 

After an eternity the moans stopped. The creatures folded their faces back into themselves and reassumed their solemn expressions. They stood, eyes closed, heads down, for what felt like another hour. Then, very slowly, they dispersed into the woods. None came near.

Late that night, in Nadinha’s room, she and the girl held each other but did not feel the need to talk. Sleep came surprisingly easy.

#

Nadinha’s father had brought her. He put a hand on her shoulder and sipped his beer, both of them sweaty in the blazing summer sun. Around them townsfolk in flowery dresses were chatting and setting out blankets. They were in a clearing, red-brown trees shooting up around them; the wooden stage looked like it was made of junkyard planks and held together by spit. Last year a Joan Baez impersonator had made a small fortune doing a few creaky-voiced renditions and holding her hat out for tips, and this year they seemed to have really gone all out: a distant-looking man with dark circles under his eyes, who looked vaguely like Bob Dylan, was tuning up beside the stage. 

Nadinha had brought a popsicle from the freezer but it had melted in her pocket and now she didn’t want to take it out. Her father, along with two bottles of beer, had brought two towels and a tupperware container of watermelon slices. He sat and grunted. She laid down on her towel and picked at blades of grass. 

The man was indeed supposed to be Bob Dylan. People cheered and whistled. But halfway through “Blowin in the Wind” there were yelps and squeals in the audience and a great many people were getting up and moving and bumping into each other. Nadinha’s father stood up and walked off, and she went back to work on the tower of grass blades on the corner of her towel, which was almost the height of a pencil when you put it flat. She kept stacking grass and when she heard the gunshots she knew what was happening. It was a shame. She liked the funny thing the first creature had done with the cards. She would have liked to have seen one more trick. 

#

Divorce went about as well as Nadinha had expected it to. The first thing she bought with the money was a plane ticket to Oregon, her first trip home in thirty years.

The first thing she noticed was how small the driveway was. As a child it had been like a jumbo jet runway, now it was scarcely as wide as a hiking trail. She fished in her pocket for the keys and jimmied them in the lock until it opened. No one lived here anymore—her parents had moved but refused to sell the property.

Small rooms were big and big rooms were small. The layout of the kitchen and bathrooms seemed to have been put through Google Translate one too many times. And there was less furniture; empty space spread everywhere like a disease. 

Here was the kitchen sink. Here was the closet Nadinha had hid from her little brother in. Here was the bed Mommy and Daddy had made him in. Daddy was a happy drunk, a quiet guy, a Beatles fan, a wannabee hippie in his youth, a guy who had a copy of A People’s History of the United States on his bedside table for years and never made it more than forty pages in, a depressive who hated shrinks, a good lover, a bad lover, a potbelly, a guy who never really made friends after graduation. Mommy was a honky laugher, a riot at craps, an amateur poet who did readings in libraries, someone who freaked out at airports, scared and boring in the sack, the kind of woman who wrote things in her journal like “love is simple, stupid! if you can give yourself to someone then you should.” Daddy loved Mommy because she was easy and made him feel important. Mommy loved Daddy because she thought he had a creative side behind the quiet front he put on. Nadinha supposed that was why she had loved Matthew. He said he was working on a novel but wouldn’t show her until he was finished. After two years she came to suspect that there was no novel at all.

The difference was that Nadinha had had the sense to leave. Her daughter would leave even sooner, and ten generations from now there would be a Rosario who just wouldn’t bother.

Outside the kitchen window were the woods, calm and quiet. She knew there was nothing out there but found herself drawn regardless. She stepped through the sliding door at the far end of the kitchen, down the steps of the porch, and admired the trees for a while. 

Then she walked around the side of the house to the road. She headed past streetlamps and empty windows. There was no GrillMaster this time, no cigarette boxes. Everything was different, but the road was the same.

The woods were disappointing: well-lit and not the slightest bit foreboding. She knew the woods of her ninth year were a place she could not return. There comes a time in life when there are people you can no longer be. 

But there was a rustle.