A boy walks into a room and crosses to a desk with five open books and a lithograph of a carriage house in a rural county near Nice. Outside the window hang the branches of poplars old beyond remembering.
On a bench sits a girl, engrossed in one of the books: a collection of melodic poems about life in Paris, kittens and root brandy the color of blood.
The boy picks up the carriage house and sees in it the apple orchard near where his grampa lived, the flagstoned pathway, the gnats thick as fog that swarmed about his head and knees at the door of the gray, weathered outhouse. He glances to see if she has noticed.
The girl pretends to smile at a quaint image of clowns and balloons. The boy pulls an orange wad from his pocket and smoothes it all over until it suits him. Then he plunks it onto the desk directly in front of the girl.
The object, a petrified canary with a golden bill, one black spot below the eye, and nearly all of its feathers still intact, lies obscuring the circus story. The girl’s pulse quickens and her eyes glitter at the sight of the rare bird.
“See what I found?” the boy says.