The Lemonwood Quarterly

***

“Good morning, girls!” Mommy sang, throwing open the curtain. The soggy gray outside that little square of glass did not reflect the joy beginning to rustle within the room. “Happy Birthday!”

It took a moment, but only a moment—the back of a fist drawn heavy across some eyelashes—for Julia to realize. Springing up, she whipped the blanket off herself and her sister. “My tail! Look at my tail!”

Mommy gasped. Julia shimmied and adjusted herself, unfurling an enormous plume of shiny, colorful feathers. Much like a peacock, but also, much like a billboard in Las Vegas and a New Year’s Eve fireworks display. It moved, even when Julia wasn’t moving. It danced and winked and, yes, Mommy was sure, it was changing colors.

A small lump still curled in bed under this ostentatious tail let out a little roar. “Wow.”

Julia, still pawing at the totality of her new tail, looked down at the lump with love. “Let’s see yours, Lynnie!”

Lynn groped behind her, feeling around beneath the opening in her new jammies. The corners of her eyes and lips melted downward, pulled at the same time by curiosity and worry.

“Hmm,” was all she said.

“Oh, let me see it,” Mommy said. She took a step toward her baby and tugged at one of the unicorns until all she could see was a bare bottom. 

And nothing else.

Something inside Mommy rose up and blocked her throat. In the place where air should be coming in and going out, or turning thoughts into words, Mommy had a huge, sharp, black chunk that caught onto all sides and grabbed hold right there. So Mommy stood still, silently wrestling with that chunk.

Julia looked at Mommy, then back to Lynn’s bottom, which until this very moment would’ve certainly called for a laugh or a giggle and a tickle which certainly would’ve produced a flatulent greeting from her sister.

But not today. Not on their eighth birthday. The only thing Julia found in her throat was, “Umm…”

There they were, Mommy choking on darkness, Julia umming, and Lynn feeling around her backside, all of them under an umbrella of luxury and pomp that undulated above them like island trees in a warm holiday breeze.

Just then, Daddy burst through the door with a small cake and two wrapped parcels. Well, not a cake, really. More like a tart. But for however small the tart was, Daddy made up for it with exuberance and volume. “Haaaaaaapy biiiiiirth-day tooooooo—”

Then he saw it. “Oh dear God.” That part was said tart-sized. 

***

It was, after all, a school day. Mommies and Daddies have to get little girls dressed and fed and brushed and out the door on a school day. Even on eighth birthdays. 

So there they all sat, crammed around the kitchen table, Julia fluffing her tail and being reminded to eat her breakfast cake and drink her milk. Mommy still hadn’t done much talking, especially when the girls had opened their presents. Each had yet another new garment designed to accommodate their eight-year tails. These, however, were not regular clothes with holes cut out like their pajamas. No one else would see their pajamas, so that was okay. 

It looked like Mommy and Daddy had spent all their money on these. Julia recognized the fancy tag that she’d only seen on one other girl in her class, the one whose father worked for the bank and never got home until after bedtime. 

For Julia, they’d bought a deep reddish dress that, much like her tail, winked and flashed with little gold flecks, but only when she moved it. It was almost too much, all of the shimmering and shining, between the dress and the tail. But it was what Mommy and Daddy picked out. A special dress with folded seams in the back that could stretch and zip and allow a tail of any size to slip through. Even a majestic tail of peacock fireworks. 

Lynn pulled the paper from her gift, somewhere between happy and sad. It was so hard for little girls to name all of the emotions possible in a day. Especially a day as confusing as an eighth birthday with no tail.

Inside her package was a yellow playsuit, perfect for anyone who liked to run and climb and dance and still not have to change clothes to go to a fancy dinner. It was silky and smooth like water that had become fabric for just a moment. And of course, it had the same rigging in the back where her tail was supposed to find its way through.

She broke off a flake of her breakfast and shoved it into her mouth. Lynn never used a fork. Not messy enough, and too slow. “I still think I’ll get mine. Maybe tomorrow. I can feel something back there. Like I have to poop. But I don’t have to poop. But it feels like that.”

Julia, very much using a fork and being extra careful not to get any crumbs on her tail, said, “Maybe you have an invisible tail. Mommy, do you know anyone who had an invisible tail?”

Daddy noticed Mommy wasn’t quite ready to hear what her voice would sound like, what with that horrible wad still there. “The tallest oak tree started out as a little nut that held its ground and wouldn’t give up.” He rubbed Lynn’s head, her hair resembling a short, dark version of her sister’s magnificent tail. “And you, little Lynn, are our nuttiest nut.”

Lynn washed her cake down with a gulp of milk. “You’re worried I’m going to die. Like all the other nuts on the forest floor that don’t grow into trees.”

Mommy coughed and covered it with a miserable little hiccup. 

“What do you know about forests?” Daddy asked. “You’ve barely been out of London. Come now,” he said, looking at his watch. “Don’t want to make us late for school. The starting point of all achievement is desire…but you won’t get very far if you have trouble leaving the house.”

***

“So, how was school, darlings?” Mommy asked the weary trio stuffing itself through the doorway.

Julia wanted desperately to boast about all of the teachers and classmates who fawned over her tail. It was exactly what she dreamed her first day of being eight would be like. Even Domenick Anderson, the goalie on the school football club, who was eleven, stopped at her lunch table to tell her, “Your tail’s pretty awesome.” She could live this day over and over again and never want another thing. 

But she couldn’t swim in the joy of who she was becoming. She had a sister to think of. A sister who curiously had not grown a tail.

Instead, she said, “Ask Lynn. She passed her spelling test.”

Mommy did her best to smile. She really did. “Is that so?” 

“Together,” Lynn said. “T-O-G-E-T-H-E-R. Miss Byrne has a trick. To, get, her. Together.”

“That’s very clever,” Mommy said, and she meant it. She really did.

“But I missed one. I got nine out of ten. Separate. I spelled it with an e in the middle instead of an a.”

“Well,” Daddy said, untying his shoes, “Success is walking from failure to failure with no loss of enthusiasm. Believe me, I know. Focus on the nine words you got right and remember that’s who you are. Don’t let the one thing that didn’t go right define you.”

“Oh, Daddy.”

Daddy really thought he was helping. But the girls—Mommy being a girl herself—mostly found all that positive reassurance exhausting.

Exhaustion was exactly the medicine required for that evening, however, so Daddy’s attempt to help may have missed the target he’d set up for himself, but the ricochet struck the center of a much more valuable mark.

Once the girls were undressed and redressed and brushed and kissed and reassured and tucked into bed, Mommy and Daddy found a corner far away from the twins where they could share hushed, somber thoughts. Neither had heard of an invisible tail, although anything was possible. And both knew that tails grew on children the night before their eighth birthday. Not a moment later. Ever.

So the absence of a tail was troubling. So troubling, in fact, that Mommy and Daddy stayed up past their bedtime discussing ways to keep their little Lynn safe and protected for the next three-hundred-and-sixty-four days.

***

Life continued along a line slightly below the mark on the wall where life had been before two girls woke up with one tail. Over the next few weeks, the sliver of space between the sisters as they slept in their beds remained the same, but widened in the hours spent in daylight. It was during that time when Julia was showered with compliments and contemplations of what it must mean for her future. At only eight, she was living a life dangerously close to validation. 

Lynn, on the other hand, who was used to spinning and skipping and shouting across a wide-open world that swayed and answered her back, began to notice the walls at the edges. Smiles on the faces of her friends and teachers didn’t last as long. Their eyes seemed more interested in shoeprints and dust bunnies and other objects along the floor. She missed seeing the light of happiness in other people’s eyes. She missed thinking she was the one who put it there. 

And she knew the fact that she never got her tail was putting this new aversion into their eyes. It was all her fault.

Lynn continued to wear the special clothes with the tail holes in them until they became more of a beacon than a tail itself. 

One day after school—Lynn in regular pants, Julia under a fabulous shadow of feathery, colorful fireworks—Mommy attempted to hoist her family back to the line, straining against the weight that pinned them to the ground. “How was school today?”

Julia kicked off her shoes. “Felix Patterson got his tail today. He’s the last one in the class.”

Mommy tried not to show how disappointed she was at the topic of tails. “Oh? What was it?” 

“A kickball. Big red one. He can’t sit at his desk. Had to stand for most of our lessons, or lay on his belly. Teacher said she’ll get the handyman to make him a special chair for tomorrow.”

“He’s not the last one in class,” Lynn said. “Vivek Sludge Gupta doesn’t have his yet.”

Julia’s hands twisted around each other near her ear, untangling a knot of hair that had caught in her tail. “Vivek Gupta doesn’t have one because he’s nine. His tail fell off last year. I think it was a dog tail or something.”

“I don’t remember that,” Lynn frowned.

Julia danced along a narrow edge, fearing the fall to one side or the other. “Picture day is tomorrow. The Headmaster called me to the office today. They picked me to be the feature photo. That’s why Daddy is still at work. The magazine people are there setting everything up.”

It was an honor indeed. The student chosen for the cover of the school magazine found a way to stay relevant. The recognition helped with college applications, job interviews, dates, and other rites of passage that seem far more important at the time than they really are. But for an eight-year-old, it was everything. 

Mommy could see that Julia wanted to be happier. Mommy herself wanted to be allowed to be happier. Lynn saw how small her world had become. No fields or mountains to explore. Just tight kitchen walls and four more eyes that wouldn’t look at her. Six when Daddy came home.

“You don’t need to be sad,” she told them. “I can feel a tail back there. I know it. You can be happy for Julia. I’m happy for her.” Turning to her sister, she said, “You really have the best tail I’ve ever seen. Of course they chose you for the feature photo. It’s way better than a kickball or a puppy tail or Christmas lights or that silly glass thing sticking out of Craig Bienamen’s butt. It’s lovely, Lovely. I just wish everyone would stop feeling so bad for me, because it makes me feel bad that I’m making you feel bad. Why can’t we all just be happy again?”

Despite the tears that painted little glistening lines down Mommy’s face, the three were happy again. Julia and Mommy reached out toward their Lynn, eyes very much looking right at her and nowhere else. She dove toward them, wanting their arms around her, needing their arms around her. The hug began, gentle and loving, and just before her favorite part—the squeeze—Lynn felt something tickle and twitch. 

And she coughed. 

Mommy and Julia let go and looked at each other. They looked at each other, and then the floor, and at the pictures on the wall and the door that Daddy would be coming through soon, and everywhere other than at Lynn and her tired, watery eyes.

***

“I hate going to school,” Lynn crossed her arms and pulled her whole body into a fist. 

“But you’re so good at it!” Daddy said, trying his best to pull a shirt over a girl who had turned into a fist. “Besides, if you didn’t come to school with me and Julia, who’d tell us jokes on the way? Or point out which clouds look like rocket ships and frogs having a poo?”

It didn’t work. The Lynn-fist only tightened. “The clouds don’t look like anything today.” She coughed again. “The whole world is just grey.” 

“Well, when the world wants to be grey, we can be the light. We can’t let clouds dampen our spirits.” Daddy wouldn’t let anything dampen his spirits. “Come on now, help me get this shirt on or you’ll be very chilly in school and maybe get in a spot of trouble for having your nipples out.”

Not even the word nipples worked. And that was usually a sure-fire way to get Lynn rolling.

“They all make fun of me anyway,” Lynn said. “They say I’m going to marry Vivek Sludge Gupta because we’re the only ones without tails. They say awful things and pretend to be nice to me, but they’re mean, Daddy. All of them.”

“Not all of them,” Julia offered, a thin layer of rime building up around her edges. “Macy and Kori and I never say anything mean to you.”

“Because all you talk about is your tail. How perfect it is. How your picture on the magazine was the best they’d ever seen, and how you’re certainly going to be famous someday. You’re pretty much famous now.”

“Listen,” Daddy held Lynn’s face between his palms. They felt cool against her cheeks. “No one can make you feel inferior without your consent. If anyone says mean things, it just means they are mean people. They’re not telling you anything about you. They’re saying, ‘I’m an idiot who doesn’t know any better, and I make myself feel bigger by making other people feel small.’ What they don’t realize is that the only way to make yourself feel bigger is by pointing out the things that make other people feel good about themselves. Let’s try it.”

Neither girl spoke. So Daddy did what Daddy thought he did best. “Lynn, you are so very creative. Your drawings show all of the stories you have inside that wonderful head of yours. When you ask me to dance or hold my hand, you bring out all the happiness inside me. And you’re utterly hilarious. Don’t ever stop belching, making faces, and pretending

“Julia, I can always trust you. You have more poise and more wits than people twice your age. Being responsible means you’re ready to take on the world, and trust me, the world will be ready for you.”

He grinned at his girls. “There now. That felt good, didn’t it?”

Lynn coughed again. Her spasm allowed Daddy to get the shirt down over her torso, leaving her arms with the option to remain trapped or wriggle their way through the sleeves to proper freedom. 

The coughing was troublesome. But, as he had told Mommy, “In a way, the devil you know is better than the devil you don’t.” Until the cough arrived, Mommy and Daddy had stressed themselves out overplanning and second-guessing every step and every minute of Lynn’s life. 

“Don’t take Lynn to the food store, she could get hit by a truck.”

“If she stays home, that gnarled old tree could come down through the wall and crush her to bits.”

“Well, keep her away from the window.” 

There were far too many conversations like this, or detours ‘round the block if someone looked shady or if something was going on that normally wasn’t, like the presence of a policeman or a hole that had opened up in the sidewalk. Each discussion or new route added extra time Mommy and Daddy didn’t realize they needed. Time that, if unused, could’ve been stored up and unpacked at the end of the day and enjoyed over a cup of tea or a cup of absolutely nothing, just relaxing in silence or sitting with their heads leaning against each other, staring into their laps and rewarding their fingers by delicately brushing them across a few pages of a good book.

But time for those things had disappeared. There was too much to worry about. 

Of course, they had to go to school. So much could go wrong there. On the way to school. Or in the lunchroom. Or a slip and fall on a mopped floor or icy staircase. The world had become more like the jaws of a bear trap stretched and trembling against its springs, and there in the center of it, was the Chandler family.

But the onset of Lynn’s cough made them think perhaps the end wouldn’t be as swift and random as a Hackney carriage careening onto the sidewalk, or a bolt of lightning snaking out of the sky and taking their little Lynnie. And although they felt no more certain about leaving the house, it also made them a little less certain in the house, and there was only so much uncertainty to go around, so somewhere, the physics of it all determined, they must be feeling better about stepping into the world.

When both girls were dressed and following Daddy out into the hallway of their building, leaving a bit of that burdensome uncertainty behind them, Julia asked, “Daddy, is it okay if I sleep at Liliana’s house tonight?

As had become tradition, Daddy balked at anything out of the ordinary. “We may have to ask Mommy when we get home. Is your sister invited?”

Julia sighed, recognizing the first building block being laid into the foundation of a no. “I’m sure she can come if she wants to.”

“I’d love to,” Lynn cooed. “I haven’t been out on a sleepover in ages.” 

Daddy thought about this as the three made their way down the stairs to the first floor. They’d avoided elevators since the non-appearance of Lynn’s tail, determining stairs to be the safer way to give one’s body over to gravity, although Daddy was sure he’d heard of more people falling down staircases than dying in elevators, but research be damned, there was something off about stepping into a little box suspended over a hole. And yes, the stairs did take away more time from teas and books and restorative silence, but after only a few months, Daddy was no longer short of breath on the way up, and he’d lost three-quarter stone and needed to buy a thinner pair of pants. “Things work out best for those who make the best of how things work out,” he’d told Mommy one night, stepping off the scale. He wasn’t sure she’d heard him, but he felt good about the unexpected development nonetheless.

Similar advice seemed fitting for his two daughters as they reached the landing. Squatting under Julia’s tail so his eyes were level with theirs, he told his girls, “Life isn’t what happens to us, it’s what we do with what happens to us. If we’re so worried about what it might mean that this one hasn’t gotten her tail yet,” he tousled Lynn’s hair, “that we stop living our lives, well then, what’s the point? I say, do your sleepovers. And whatever else you fancy. I’ll talk to Mommy about it when we get home.”

***

Mommy was not happy when they got home.

“But Dear,” Daddy pleaded. “Let’s just say this is her last year with us.”

“Don’t say that!” Mommy’s words sizzled against her teeth. “Don’t ever say that!”

“Okay, then why are we shuttering her in? What are we trying to protect her from? All we’re doing is making right now pretty unbearable. And in the off chance that the thing we don’t want to happen is happening—” he dammed up her interruption with a wave of his hand, “we’re ruining whatever time she has left. Whether it’s a day or a lifetime, it’s hardly either.”

Mommy didn’t fight the tears, they were an important part of her platform. “Well I don’t want it on my head that I let her go. I don’t want it to be my fault that I said yes to some undertaking or sleepover or any other idea that puts the whole thing in motion. Why do you think I never leave? Do you think I like being stuck here? I don’t. But I want to hold that little girl and never let her go. I look at her and all I can see is the sadness that is coming. I can’t enjoy anything. The silly, forgettable moments are anything but. Just yesterday she asked me to help her with a tricky Lego block. Just a stupid blue block that was stuck to another blue block. But it wasn’t. There was nothing normal about it. It was everything.

“But even suffering through those horrible everyday things that are just so…so heavy, it’s still better than not having her here. I don’t want to get used to her absence and I certainly couldn’t live with myself if I end up being the one who causes it.”

A small cough from the other side of the wall pinned itself to the silence like a thumbtack in a bulletin board, dangling from it an advertisement for a faraway adventure.

It gave Daddy an idea. “Let’s take her to the doctor, see what they say.”

“I don’t want to hear what they have to say,” Mommy said. “I’m not ready.”

Daddy squinted, seeing something far away but also so close he had to look between his ears. “What if…” he started, “…the doctor says she would’ve been fine if we’d just brought her in earlier, we could’ve caught it in time, but since we waited, whatever it is inside her is there to stay?”

Mommy leapt to her feet. “Girls! Get your coats!”

The girls were already wearing their coats, having been aware that Daddy was campaigning for the sleepover. They burst into the room, shining like Venus on a clear night. “Mommy said yes?!” they asked.

Daddy raised an eyebrow, but did his best not to look defeated. He failed. “Maybe. Just need a brief stop at the doctor’s office on the way.”

***

“Just a cold?” Mommy and Daddy sang together like it was the chorus of their favorite song. 

“Just a cold,” the doctor repeated. “Some fluid in the lungs, but nothing serious. Get her some rest. I can prescribe an antihistamine, but you’ll save money getting one at the chemist.”

The doctor didn’t realize by the time he’d spoken the word rest, he was speaking to an empty room.

***

But the joy of a simple sleepover eventually passed. The Chandlers soon found themselves living under a glass canopy in a world where flying objects were as common as the solid ground beneath their feet. Through habit born of love and concern, Mommy and Daddy crafted a bubble around Lynn, who still had no tail, no terminal disease, yet at eight years and ten months, was hurtling toward a fate they could not protect her from, because they did not know where to look for it.

That bubble enveloped Julia as well. Julia, who had to turn down invitations. Julia, whose family skipped vacation to the beach that summer, the vacation she had saved up all of her money for. The one she’d gushed to friends about. A small dream eschewed “just for this year,” her parents had said. “What with all of the traffic accidents.

“And the reports of sharks I’ve seen in the newspapers,” Mommy added

“A young man from Denmark was caught in an undertow and swept out to sea, never found again,” Daddy reported. “I think we’ll have a better time right here in London, where the only thing we’ll have to worry about is—”

“Boredom,” Julia interrupted.

“Now, Julia Lovely,” Daddy chided.

Lynn came to her sister’s defense. “She’s right. You’re only acting like this because I didn’t get my tail. It’s my fault that everyone’s so worried about me all the time. It’s my fault we don’t do anything. It’s my fault Daddy hasn’t shaved in days and Mommy rarely holds your hand anymore and you whisper everything to each other now.”

“Lynn Picture Party—”

“And it’s my fault Julia doesn’t show off her tail anymore. She’s got the most beautiful tail in all of England and she’s hiding it in regular pants again because I haven’t got one. She could be showing it off on the pitch, or the Harvest Dance, but instead she’s got it tucked away. If I had that tail I’d take pictures of it, I’d draw it and run through the park until it lifted me off the ground. I wouldn’t sit here sobbing over my little sister.”

Julia’s hand crawled around her body and pulled down the top of her waistband. “I hate this tail,” she admitted. “I hate that I got it all and you got nothing.” Her face twisted, evolutions of discomfort to agony, the crescendo filling the room with a sharp shriek, her hand whipped back around clutching a long tuft of willowy feathers.

“Here,” she said, thrusting a thick strand of plumage at her sister. “You take this piece. Fasten it to your butt. Daddy’s good with fixing things, Daddy, you help stick it on her.” She’d plucked it from the root. Lynn could see a small drop of blood on its tip. “I just want things to be normal again.”

***

Things. What a vague choice Lynn’s older sister had requested to be normal. Things could not be normal once things had been dumped from their packages, upended and strewn across the galaxy, picking up dirt and soaking in oily puddles and collecting all sorts of stories that made them unfit to be returned. No, things certainly were not normal. 

Time was one of those things whose abnormality was magnified in the tumult of tail-lessness. It would speed up and slow down at the most inopportune times. Weekends and holidays mired in troughs of valium stasis whenever Mommy and Daddy couldn’t agree on plans. And twenty-four glorious hours were over in just a few breaths, the sun acting as though it were late for an appointment on the other side of the planet whenever the girls were shopping or splashing in a pool or forgetting that in just a few days, they would turn nine.

Three nights left. Three-hundred-and-sixty-two days into her eighth year and still breathing breath into her Daddy’s chest, his shirt smelling of wood shavings and peat. It was bedtime. Another tick of the giant clock they’d soon have behind them. “Daddy, I don’t think I’m going to die anymore.”

Year number eight had desensitized Daddy so, he wasn’t sure if he felt surprised by this statement, or sad, or was just waiting for her to continue. But being a Daddy, he knew he needed to respond. “Well, that would be a blessing. And trials as bitter as the ones we’ve been through are often blessings in disguise. Think about a caterpillar. Just when she thought the world was ending, she turned into a butterfly.”

“I don’t think I’m going to turn into a butterfly, either. Julia’s tail’s enough like a butterfly anyway.”

“Well, what do you think is going to happen?”

Lynn looked up at her Daddy, so happy to find his eyes looking straight into everything inside of her. She stared at those eyes, little lines like tiny red streaks of lightning frozen in a milky white sky. The two lay there sharing their eyes, his question slamming into her heart. Her answer flowed down her cheeks and speckled Daddy’s shirt with growing stains. He held her there, neither one blinking the fear and failure from those wide eyes that understood each other so completely.

Mommy and Julia heard Lynn crying, and joined them on the tiny bed. None spoke, knowing their words wouldn’t be heard over the setting sun and the ticking clock. Instead, they wrapped their arms around their terrified little Lynn and gave her a proper squeeze

Above the cacophony of life slipping away, a new sound. A muffled wheeze of sorts.

All four of them froze. It had definitely come from within their tangled pile of loving limbs. Lynn’s eyes blinked away tears. Behind them shone an exhilarating mosaic of confusion, discomfort, fear and hope.

“Hug me again!” she shouted. 

Her family obliged, putting three-hundred-and-sixty-three days of faith into another squeeze. Almost immediately, it was accompanied by the same sound, a bit higher-pitched than before, like a small band of kazoos was trying to escape from somewhere beneath them.

“Let’s see what’s this about,” Mommy sat up and wrapped her arms around Lynn’s midsection and gave a good hard squash. Lynn’s pajamas shuddered, the source of the blast had been narrowed down.

Julia dove in, yanking Lynn’s pants down around her knees, ready to rejoice.

Mommy, Daddy, and Julia stared down at Lynn’s exposed bottom as she jerked her head back and forth cursing how poorly designed the human neck really was for such occasions. “What’s there?” she exhaled. “Oh please tell me, what’s it look like?”

Mommy, Daddy, and Julia had no response. Because it looked the same as it had when she woke up on her eighth birthday, and every day before, and every day since. 

No tail.

Lynn felt around with both hands, searching for her tail. “Wha…where is it? I can feel it! I know it’s there.”

Two proper adults with decades of experience and knowledge on this earth, and it took an eight-year-old to see. “Squeeze her again!”

This time, Mommy and Daddy both leaned in for a double-hug, pressing their entire everything into the little girl between them, peeking down her back as they did so. Julia’s face was uncomfortably close to her sister’s bare rear end, the whole scene was quite inappropriate had it happened any other place at any other time in the history of existence.

But for this family, it was a drumroll that tattooed their hearts.

As they held and strained, the noise began again, this time louder, as it was unobstructed by blue felt pajamas with yellow moons. It whistled and grew, and a small slit of skin opened, like an eye without the lashes. A flat, rolled-up coil unfurled from the opening. It was yellow and blue and red and pink, all sorts of squiggles and dots. It continued to unroll and grow, the flatness of it puffing up a bit as the two grownups squeezed, until it reached its full length and struck Julia right between her eyes and belted out a deafening tweet.

It shook like that, fully stretched out in the tiny room, screaming and celebrating, then as Mommy and Daddy let go in surprise and ultimate relief, it curled itself up and snapped right back into Lynn’s rump.

“Well,” Daddy said. “That actually makes quite a lot of sense, now, doesn’t it?”

“That felt amazing!” Lynn cried. “What is it?”

Julia hugged her, causing a tiny bleat from below. “It’s a fandoozle! A party horn! Oh, Lynnie, it’s just hilarious!”

All four of them melted in the dizzying liberation of their discovery. Smiles and sighs and giggles were passed from one to the other, until Lynn craned an eyebrow and donned a right respectable pout.

“You mean we could’a been doing this the whole time?”

The realization was rebirth, all of the pain and wonder that goes along with it. Mommy wiped her face. “I guess we could’ve.”

Pursed lips curled into a wry smile. “Can I stay up all night?”

Mommy wanted so much to tell her yes. But something else was stuck in that place where a yes should come from. She shook her head, teeth beaming, tears streaming. All she could do was laugh. They had all night to find the words. All night and more.

Sean Heffron has been writing and publishing since 2006, mostly commercial fiction. He published “The Skinny On Your First Year in College” for Rand MediaCo., won an honorable mention in the “Weird Christmas” Flash Fiction contest, and self-published three novels. He is currently working on the third novel in a three-book deal from Aethon Books, and took a break between books two and three to write this piece, Tails of the Eighth Year. Sean works as an Assistant Dean and a writing instructor at a university in New England. He is inspired by his family, who enjoy all things outdoors. Sean tells us, “We’re like a small pack of lumberjacks, sans the beards.”