The Girl in the Well Is Me by Karen Rivers

plate of my skull. Macaroni is the food of despair and the color of wrinkled carrots and thin air.
    â€œStar light, star bright, first star I see tonight, I wish I may, I wish I might, have the wish I wish tonight,” I say or I think or both. I close my eyes and float my wish up there, blowing on it like a flea riding on a dandelion seed, wishing, of course, that I am not in a well.
    â€œKAMMIE?” shouts a man’s voice, which is coming from the floating head of Kandy’s dad. “ARE YOU STILL OK?”
    â€œI’m dreaming in a thickly dream,” I try to yell, but it comes out quiet, like you’d expect when the air is curdled yogurt. Suddenly, the walls of the well are as cool as sheets that you slide your feet into after a hot day and find a patch that hasn’t already been scorched by your sleeping heat.
    The goats are rustling underneath me, so maybe after all, they aren’t zombies. They would like to come out. Probably they dream of being Moroccan tree goats, climbing up to eat all those Argan seeds so they can poop them out again to make oil for shining hair. The Argan goats are the envy of the goat world. “
OU EST MOROCCO
?” I say to them, all slow motion, with the wrong syllables and things. They make goat sounds in return. They sound like tiny horses. I don’t know what goats sound like. Do they whinny?
    â€œ
Non, non
,” they say. “
Ou est la salle de bain?
”
    â€œOK,” I tell them. “Fine. Be that way.” I think they are mad that I brought up Morocco, the land of tree goat dreams. I think they are making fun of me for peeing in my shoe. “There is no bathroom here,
mes amis
,” I add, for good measure.
    I want to tell Kandy’s dad’s floating face in the distance about the animals down here who all speak gently in French, but it feels like it doesn’t matter now. I’m sleepy and I’m being rescued, so maybe it would be OK if I just closed my eyes again and so I do, I close them, and the dream folds over me like layers of paper being creased perfectly by a teacher’s hands, and pretty soon it’s going to be a peace dove and I’m going to fly away on it to our sister city in Japan. I wish I didn’t feel so funny, but it’s just part of the dream, after all, and I really miss my dad, that’s not even a lie, raisin-­souled liar that he is.

7
    D reams
    I wake up, stiff and sore and still in the well. It’s been five minutes or five hours or five years. Maybe I am fifteen now. Is it over?
    â€œDad?” I say.
    And then from down deep below me, I hear my dad’s voice saying, “Sugar Peanut Pie, you’re going to have to wake up.” Which is when I realize that Dad has tunneled out of jail using salsa to melt the metal bars and a spoon for digging, and he’s going to crawl up and save me. We saw that on
Mythbusters
once, Dad and me, lying on the couch in the living room, me upside down, and him the right way up. Him saying, “If I’m ever in the slammer, I’ll know what to do!” And me saying, “Salsa gives me a rash.” And him laughing. And me laughing because neither of us ever imagined he’d be in prison, except he must have, because how could he not? He knew what he was doing.
    â€œAu secours, Papa!”
I whisper. “Help me!” and my whisper gets bigger as it falls down the well, until it is as big as a paper airplane, swooping into Dad’s eye.
    â€œOuch!” he says. “Careful, sport.”
    A dog barks. It’s nice that Dad has a dog, who is Lassie. “
Le woof
,” says the dog and I smile beatifically, which is a way of smiling that is very holy and nearly biblical and then, once again, something hard and heavy lands on my head. I have to swim through water and thick fog to get to the top of my own head, much like in the book
James and the Giant Peach
where they eat their way to the surface of