her hands are narrow and slender and she opens and closes her fingers like slats on a fan and peers inbetween her fingers into the out-side, a world of parks and sand dunes spilling salt like stars and three little girls on swings. aurora loves little girls, especially pretty ones with paleskin and kneesocks and long braids like whips. she stands in the shade where the sun cannot touch her and watches the little girls, remembering that she was a little girl once and that she must look like a witch to them now, so she must not look at them too hard, and she does not look at them too hard. she pretends she is doing something else. she pretends she is waiting for someone in the shadow of the sycamore tree.

    no one will come, so she will watch the little girls swing so that their skirts fly out behind them like wedding veils - tiers of lace - ships setting sail. their thin legs gleaming, pumping in and out. arched like bows. aurora collects images of the little girls in her mind: the wisps of hair that stray from their bindings. their plump arms gripping the chain-link of the swing. she wishes that she was small again, laughing on a swing in a playground filled with sand. she wishes she would shrink, that one day she would notice her sleeves slouching beyond the tips of her fingers like a young girl in her father's sweater. too soon people had said to her, "oh, my, you're all grown up now." and since she looked the way she did, her hands slim but too large for a child, her face devoid of the softness of children's faces, since she seemed to be olderandwiser people expected her to do things she could not do. did not want to do. they made her do them anyhow. sometimes aurora sees small children in supermarkets, trailing behind their mothers, and she considers stealing them and devouring them like in a fairy tale.

    the little girls on the swings wave at her, giggling to one another, and she waves back to them even though she feels awkward, as if they are making her foolish. the little girls ascend high into the air on their swings, grazing the atmosphere, every part of them rippling and shining. the swings swoosh into the air, and then rush forward, each little girl suddenly leaping off her swing, thrusting her body forward, into thin air, and unexpectedly, it makes aurora gasp, the little girls don't follow gravity back to the ground. they just keep soaring, the billows of their skirts catching the wind, propelling them into the blank sky, until, like a balloon-string that a tiny hand has lost, the little girls vanish completely from sight.

    she leaves the park and she does not look back.