Free Searching for Sky by Jillian Cantor

smart birds; they never showed themselves when they were that loud. “Now, I know you have a lot to learn,” she is saying now, “so anything you don’t know, you can ask me. Don’t be afraid. And I have a team of professionals coming to the house. You’ll be so much more comfortable there than in some sort of … establishment.”
    I nod, though I don’t really understand what she’s saying. Except it seems she is right about one thing. I have a lot to learn. When we reach the end of the pathway, then turn, then walk down another, and then finally go out a coming-in place and into real sunlight, everything is unfamiliar.
    The ground is black like the night sky and hard beneath my feet, which already feel strange in these terrible flip-flops. They flap and make weird squawking noises as I walk, and my toes slip away. I don’t understand why I have them on, and I reach down to take them off.
    “Don’t do that, honey.” The grandmother woman stops me with her hand. “The ground is dirty.” I wonder if that means there is nothing like Falls here, that there is no way to get cleanin California, and the thought makes my heart pound. Everything is different. Everything is wrong. River is gone .
    I look up to catch the sky. I feel like it’s been forever since I’ve seen it, and I want it to comfort me now, to show me that something here is as it always was. But even that looks different. Less blue and more white gray. The air is cold against my skin, and I shiver.
    “I should’ve brought you a sweatshirt,” she says, and she looks up to the sky, too. “It isn’t always like this. This is just June gloom, the marine layer hanging around a little longer than it should. Give it a month and the sky will blue up again in the afternoons. The air will warm up a little, too.”
    I don’t answer her but I look around. In the distance there are pale brown hills, higher than anything I have ever seen. They are blank, like the sand, missing green trees. A few palms dot the far side of this blackness we are standing on, but they are different from the palms I know, thinner, flimsier. And between us and them, there are rows and rows of strange, oddly shaped … bushes? All different colors and sizes, but very shiny like sea glass, dotting the blackness.
    The grandmother woman takes my arm and pulls me toward one of them, a red one, the color of what she was wearing when she first came to see me. She pulls something out of the rabbit pelt container over her shoulder and then reaches in front of me to pull the strange bush—(or maybe it’s a cave?)—apart. “Go ahead,” she says. “Get in.”
    I shake my head. I have no idea what this is or what it will do to me. The inside looks like a small black cave, and I’m afraid I might become trapped.
    “Oh, good lord,” she says. “I didn’t even think …” She puts her hand on my arm. “Honey, this is a car. This is how people get from place to place. I turn it on with my key.” She holds up the thing in her hand. “And then I power the engine on, and it takes us where we want to go.”
    I think of the engine on the boat, the way it moved so far and so fast once Roger turned it on, Island becoming like a tiny shell behind us. “Like the boat?” I ask her now.
    “Yes, sort of. Only it takes us places on land.”
    “Why can’t we walk?”
    “Oh.” She laughs. “Honey, think of it this way: this island where you’ve been all this time, it’s the size of this freckle.” She points to a tiny brown spot on her wrist. “And, California, well, it’s the size of this.” She gestures to show the length of her body. “It would take us two days to walk home from here. “We’re not all that close. Even in the car, it’ll take a good thirty minutes or more. Freeway traffic this time of day, well, it could take even longer.”
    Nothing she says makes sense. Freeway? Traffic? California is the size of her body? Island the size of a brown spot on her arm? But I