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Bear brought him into the kitchen where Fox, Tiger, and Buck were eating their lunch of vegetable stew and rice, baked apples and blueberry gingerbread. They asked the gardener to join them.

Sometimes at night, gathered around the long wooden table finishing the peach-spice or apple-ginger pies and raspberry tea, they would tell stories of their youth – the things they had suffered separately when they went out alone to try the world. The stories were of freak shows and loneliness and too much liqour or powders and the shame of deformity.

The gardener was invited to share in the cherrymint pie she had made for the evening, and he spoke with her, asked about the books she liked to read (they brought her children's stories of magic, and old novels with thick, yellowish pages about passionate women in brutal landscapes) and the music she listened to, did she sew her own dress?

She loved to plant the beds with lillies and wisteria. camelias and gardenias, until her hands were caked with earth. To arrange the flowers in the vase like dancing sisters. To make the salmon in pomegranate sauce; the salads of spinach, red onion, pine nuts, oranges, and avocados; the golden vanilla cream custards; the breads and piecrusts that powdered her with flour.

One of our assignments was to write about your perfect dream day. I wonder what this boy's perfect dream day would be. Probably to get to fuck Pamela Lee or something. Unless he was really cool as I hoped, in which case it would be to wake up in a bed full of cute puppies and eat a bowl full of chocolate chip cookies in milk and get on a plane and get to go to a warm, clean, safe place (the cats and dogs would arrive there later, not at all stressed from their journey) where you could swim in blue-crystal water all day naked without being afraid and you could lie in the sun and tell your best friend (who was also there) your funniest stories so that you both laughed so hard you thought you'd pop and at night you got to go to a restaurant full of balloons and candles and stuffed bears, like my birthdays when I was little, and eat mounds of ice cream after removing the circuses of tiny plastic animals from on top.

I stopped at the liqour store and bought a bag of pretzels and a Mountain Dew because I hadn't eaten all day and my stomach was talking pretty loud.

One day Rose Red takes Rose White farther away than they have been before. They are in the woods gathering berries – which they eat till their hands and tongues are purple – burying their faces in the pine needles, practicing bird calls, chasing butterflies.

In the morning they feed the Bear again and help themselves to bread and honey and cheese, milk and berries.They go out into the woods. Neither of them mentions the idea of going home. They forange for food for the Bear. Roots, nuts, more berries.

There were translucent sweet red and green fruits shaped like hearts, bright gold roasted-tasting grains shaped like stars, huge ruffley purple vegetables and small satiny blue ones. Everything smelled fresh and rich and light, and Beauty found herself stooped over her plate, licking it, like a wild animal.

We got the flu and ate rice balls and miso soup in the bathtub.