Searching for Sky by Jillian Cantor

Bedroom. I check, and Fake Ocean does not have a smell.
    “Megan, honey.” The grandmother woman opens Door, and there she is, standing in Pink Bedroom, looking almost as strange and unfamiliar as she did yesterday as she handed me clothes in Military Hospital.
    My stomach rumbles, and I wish I’d saved some of the fish from last night to eat now. But before I can even ask her, she says, “Come on downstairs and eat some breakfast, and then I have someone coming over to meet you.”
    “Someone?” I ask, hopeful that it could be River, that he has changed his mind and he has found me this quickly.
    “Her name is Missusfairfield,” she says. “We’ve been friends for a long time, and she is very good with teaching special-needschildren. She’s retired now, but she has agreed to meet you and possibly take you on as a private study.”
    I sigh, not understanding any of what she said, hearing only that this person with the very strange long name is not River, and that she is re-tired. I feel re-tired myself, as if all this is just too much, as if it would be easier to sleep and sleep and sleep and make it all go away. But I am also hungry, and the grandmother woman promised breakfast. So I allow her to take my hand and pull me gently from Bed.
    “How’s that leg feeling?” she asks as I put my feet on the soft ground.
    I shrug and follow her down Steps, holding on to the railing as she reminds me to. Nothing hurts, not even my leg. But there is an emptiness in me now, here, without River, in this strange place. And I wonder if this is what it feels like to be dead, if this is what my mother was feeling that morning when her lips were blue.
    The grandmother woman asks me if I need to use the toilet, and I realize I do and that this means I cannot be dead. So I nod, and she reminds me about flushing and washing my hands the way my mother used to remind me to clean my hands in Falls after I used Bathroom Tree when I was a very small child. But I am not a small child now, no matter what she might think, and it is annoying that she treats me that way.
    After I am finished, she tells me to sit down where I sat to eat my fish last night. She puts a plate on the table, with a strange-looking, thick yellow leaf on it. She hands me a fork spear and points to the plate.
    “What’s this?” I ask.
    “An omelet,” she says. I stare at her. “Eggs, cheese …” I hesitate, then touch an omelet with the fork spear, and then push hard to spear it and pick it up. It hangs there, large and strange, shell shaped and stinky. I’m not quite sure what I’m supposed to do with it, because from the way it smells, I really don’t want to put it in my mouth.
    “Oh,” she says. “You know what? Maybe I should get you some fruit instead.”
    She grabs the plate and omelet away, walks over to all her strange boxes, and then comes back with a different plate with blue and red berries, like the ones I ate at Military Hospital with a spoon. Now I pick them up and eat them quickly with my fingers, and she doesn’t tell me not to.
    As I’m eating, a high bird chirps, and then the grandmother woman murmurs something softly to herself and runs away. When she comes back, there is another woman with her— Missusfairfield , I guess. She is small, smaller than the grandmother woman, with bright orange-coral hair. Her skin is loose and wrinkled, but even more than the grandmother woman’s, and I wonder if that’s because she’s re-tired and hasn’t slept enough. But I don’t ask. She looks at the grandmother woman, leans in close to me, and then smiles so wide that I can see all her teeth, even the strange silvery ones in the back.
    “Well, hello there, Megan,” she says. “Do you mind if I take a seat?” She points to the chair next to me, and I’m not sure where she wants to take it, but since the grandmother woman doesn’t argue, I guess it’s okay, and I nod.
    But she seems to change her mind about taking it, because all she