Weight of Silence by Heather Gudenkauf

remember?” she asks me. “‘When fairies dance upon the air, reach out gently and catch one, fair. Make awish and hold it tight, then softly toss your pixie back to summer’s night.’”
    “I wonder what she wished for,” I say.
    “I wonder why she didn’t let them go,” Mom adds.
    “Maybe she was saving the wishes up for something real big, then she was going to let them all go at once.”
    It’s Mom’s turn to shrug and she lays the fluff back into your treasure box on top of all the other stuff, puts the lid back on and slides it under her bed.
    “Come on, Ben,” she says. “Let me make you a sandwich. Louis will be here soon.”
    I have an idea of what you might have wished for, because they’re the same wishes as mine. Number one—for you to talk again. Number two—get a dog. Number three—that Dad would just go on back to Alaska and not come back. God knows you’d never admit it and neither would I, but those would be your wishes. I know.

A NTONIA
    As I make Ben and me a ham sandwich and slice an apple in half, I think of Calli’s treasure box. The dandelion fluff reminds me of Louis, of when we were kids.
    The summer after Louis moved here, we’d go out to the meadow behind my house, the very house I live in now. Our field would be filled with happy yellow dandelions, and my mom would pay us a penny a weed to dig them out by the roots. No easy feat. We’d get old spoons to dig down as deep as we could, under the roots, and then toss them into an old plastic bucket. We could wrench out about one hundred in a day. My mother would give us a dollar, one shiny quarter for each of our grimy hands, and we’d hop on our bikes, ride downtown to the Mourning Glory Café and pool our earnings. I’d buy us a cherry Coke, not the kind that comes in a can like today, but the kind straight out of a soda fountain, with the cherry juice squirted in.Mrs. Mourning would always put in two straws and two cherries, one for Louis and one for me. Louis would buy us a basket of French fries, piping hot and salty. He would write my name out on top of the fries in ketchup from the squirt bottle and then script his own directly below it. The fries with my name on them were mine, the fries with his name, his to eat. Some days, we’d each buy a candy bar. I always picked Marathon bars, and he would choose a Baby Ruth. Petra’s mother, Fielda, was often at the café helping her mother. Friendly and sweet, Fielda would stand behind the counter watching us carefully, refilling our sodas. Looking back, I can see that Fielda wanted to be my friend, but I had Louis, and, well, he was all I needed, all I wanted. Years later, when we became neighbors and were eventually pregnant with our girls at the same time, Fielda tried again, invited me over for coffee, for walks, but once again, I was aloof, this time for completely different reasons. I was afraid she’d get an inkling of my sad marriage, catch my husband and me in a bad moment, see the bruises. Eventually she gave up and left me alone, just as she had eventually done when we were young.
    Our dandelion weeding would last approximately ten days. By then we were bored with the job and had our fill of cherry Cokes and fries. We hadn’t even made a dent in removing all the dandelions. They were beginning to seed and white puffs were whirling in the air above us, undoing all that we’d accomplished.
    “You know,” Louis told me, “these really are fairies.”
    “Yeah, right,” I said, unconvinced.
    “They are. My dad told me. He said that dandelion fluffs are magical fairies. If you grab one before it hits the ground, the fairy will be so grateful she will give you a wish once you set her free.”
    I sat up, setting down my dirt-crusted spoon. This interested me. Louis never spoke of his father, ever. “I didn’t know they had flowers in Chicago.”
    “Yeah, they have flowers and weeds and grass in Chicago,” he said indignantly. “Just not so much of it.
    “My