Flip the switch.

(Don’t flip the switch.)

The voices follow her everywhere. She hears them in her apartment, on the subway, in the elevator. They’re a constant undercurrent whenever she listens to music.

A subliminal message of indecision.

Turn it off. Turn everything off.

(No. Leave it on. Let things happen as they will.)

It’s been a week, and then two, and she still can’t decide, and the voices – the whispers of her own subconscious – grow louder, more persistent.

Ordinary switches – lights, power strips, her computer – seem to be urging her toward a greater choice.

The simple act of turning off a light is exhausting.

Cut the power.

(Keep the power on.)

She walks through the rain, holding the pink umbrella she’s has since childhood, imagining switches everywhere. On car doors, on mail boxes, on the sides of buildings.

Finally, her soggy feet carry her inside the tall building, to the private room at the end of the hall on the seventeenth floor.

“Any change?”

The attendant in lavender scrubs shakes his head. “No; I’m sorry.”

She sits on the side of the bed, staring at the monitors, listening to the steady beeping and the machine driven intake and outflow of air.

“Can you call the doctor, please?”

The attendant nods once and disappears.

She lifts the still-warm, wrinkled hand of the man who has been her lifelong constant, providing her with a pink tool set, a Fisher-Price car, petite garden tools so she could work along-side him.

“Pop-pop?” She uses her childhood nicknamefor him. “I know you never wanted this. I’m sorry. I should have listened.”

Her tears wet his skin, roll into the crevices of hands that could braid hair or hang a tire swing with equal finesse.

“I found my old fishing pole in the garage. You taught me how to bait my own hook, and how to stun the fish we caught. I hope… I hope there’s fishing in heaven.”

She knows he can’t hear her words. She understands that there’s no longer any THERE, there.

But she keeps on talking.

The attendant returns with the doctor in tow.

“It’s time,” she tells the woman in a lab coat over a blue suit. “Let him go.”

It’s a solemn moment and yet it’s also mundane. The doctor flips a switch.

Silence falls.

In zero point three kilometers make an upward turn onto Higher Sixth Avenue.

“Mommy, is it true that in the olden days, cars could only go left or right and not up or down?”

“Yes. I remember when I was your age, taking long drives to the beach, and being stuck in bridge traffic for hours.”

“What’s bridge traffic? Does it have to do with that weird card game Gramma and Grampa play?”

“Card ga – oh! No! They play Canasta.”

“Canasta sounds ca-nasty.”

“It’s really not, sweetie. It’s just a card game.”

“Oh.” The child took a beat. “You were going to ‘splain me about bridge traffic.”

“EXplain,” her mother said. “And yes, I will. When I was a little girl, the only way to cross the river to the road that ran along-side the sea wall was to go over a bridge. That’s a road that’s suspended above water.”

“I KNOW what a bridge is. “

“Well, this wasn’t just any bridge, it was a draw bridge.”

“So, there was traffic because everyone stopped to draw the bridge?”

“A draw bridge has a section that gets lifted up when a large boat has to go up or down the river. Some boats had masts that were too tall to go under the bridge when it was down. So they’d crank up the center, and traffic would stop and wait.”

“That doesn’t sound ‘ficient.”

“Efficient, sweetie, and no, it wasn’t. But we didn’t have cars that could go up, or Aerial Highways that went to the Tiers, so we had to wait.”

“I don’t think I’d like that.”

“Oh, it wasn’t so bad. We didn’t have guidance systems and TotalGPS like we do now, so sometimes we could turn down – “

“But you said you couldn’t GO up or down!”

“You’re right. We could turn ONTO a street we weren’t familiar with, and just see where it took us.”

“You mean, you could dev’ate from your set Travel Plan?” The little girl’s voice was full of wonder.

“Deviate. And we didn’t file travel plans. We just went wherever the road might take us.”

“And you weren’t afraid?”

“No… it was wonderful. Any trip could become an adventure. Sometimes we’d find parks or playgrounds or just neighborhoods with cute houses we didn’t know existed.”

“Do you miss it?”

“Very much. I wish you could experience it, sweetie. Life was so much more relaxed.”

“Even the bridge traffic?”

In one point three kilometers turn Down, then merge into the exit flow for Mid-level Forty-fifth Street.

“Yes. Even that.”

It was common knowledge that Jessie was one of the Special ones. Billy was four years younger than she was, but he’d known her all his life, so he knew stuff.

Like, he knew that no one ever catalogued the ways in which the wispy little girl with the rats’ nest of dishwater-blonde hair was Different; but whenever something strange happened, she was likely to be at its center.

Not that her oddity, her Otherness, was bad, mind you.

But there were little things.

Like, when you played Tea Party at her house, the tea in her doll’s cup would disappear a little at a time, even though you never saw her lift it to steal a sip.

And when you were playing Freeze Tag there were moments when you’d swear she’d frozen with her feet above the ground instead of on it.

And any time a dog or cat went missing, you were stupid if you didn’t ask Jessie to help you find it. You didn’t have to look into the luminous gray eyes that seemed so huge in her pale, pointy-chinned, freckled face to know the girl had a Way with animals.

Her Strangeness made her the favorite among the school children. Playing with her was like inviting Magic home.

But as the kids in her year edged toward adulthood, and belief in such things faded, Jessie was left alone, more often than not.

At thirteen, Jimmy from the other block hadn’t yet begun demanding to be called Jim, but he had a kind of quiet authority that he wore like a cape. If he thought something was a Bad Idea, even the worst bully would back off from whatever-it-was and go do something else.

It made sense, then, that Jessie and Jimmy would gravitate toward each other. They were both Different, even though neither was showy about it.

Billy knew this, because he was Jimmy’s little brother, and couldn’t help it. When he saw his brother and the Curious Girl leave their bikes by the side of the road and go walking down toward the pond he had to follow.

So, there was a witness when it Happened.

It was one of those days when summer hadn’t quite let go of the daytime, but fall was taking ownership of the night, and Jessie and Jimmy stood in the place where the fog curled up against the water’s edge.

“Set them out, in a circle like,” Jessie said, and Billy watched his brother take instruction from another, and a girl at that, arranging mason jars with twine around the tops.

“Good?” the older boy asked.

“Good,” the girl whispered back. Seemed like Jessie only ever whispered. As if, maybe, using her voice came at some kind of cost. “Now wait.”

Billy had been catching fireflies all his life, just like every other kid in their town, but he’d never seen the bugs just Come, the way they did for Jessie.

She held out her hand like she was catching raindrops, and every few seconds one of the jars would start to glow, the insects inside offering their Light instead of having it taken from them.

Billy wasn’t surprised when he realized the jars were hanging in the trees without actually being attached to them. Stuff like that seemed normal when Jessie was around.

You didn’t expect it, exactly; but you weren’t shocked, either.

He also wasn’t surprised when his older brother leaned in and pressed his lips against the girl’s. Billy was only nine, and mostly thought girls were gross, but there was Something About Jessie that made her more like a faerie than an actual girl.

Truth be told, Billy kinda wanted to kiss her too.

Maybe.

Or maybe not.

‘Cause Jessie was still a girl, after all.

Billy slipped away while Jimmy and Jessie were still mashing their lips against each other’s, and he was pretty sure they hadn’t seen him.

He crept quietly down the track that led to the street, past where Jessie and Jimmy had dumped their bicycles, and then ran hell-bent-for-leather back toward home, in the door, up the stairs, to his room, and slammed the door.

When he saw the twine wrapped mason jar, hanging above his bed and glowing with firefly light, maybe that should have scared him.

But Billy looked at it, swinging in mid-air, attached to nothing.

And he smiled.

The Tears are all there in bottles, aligned in rows, arranged on shelves in the far corner of the shop, where the sun can’t harm them and the temperature is constant – no chilling breezes every time the door opens.

Many shops offer a few bottles of Maiden’s Tears, but Madeleine is the only Keeper who offers the full line, and there’s no dispute that hers are the purest, the most potent.

Maiden’s Tears are most plentiful, and Madeleine has them further separated by vintage – that’s the age of the Supplier, not the age of the Tears, you understand.

Most shops never see anything beyond a 12, maybe a stray 10 if an order is mislabeled, but Madeleine offers 8s, which are full of innocent imagination. 13s, she warns, tend to induce snark when not used in extremely small amounts, and for special customers she’s been known to procure a rare, full-bodied 22 or 25.

Mother’s Tears – those are the varietals with the greatest differences. A 21 or 23 might have the best Fertility, but they’re often laced with Self Doubt and Regret. The 35s, Madeline says, and the 40s are best for boosting Confidence and Reliability, but if used incorrectly they can cause a spike in Sexuality that’s a bit unexpected.

Crone’s Tears go in and out of fashion. Some years, people clamor for the Wit and Wisdom they offer; other years, people avoid them, unwilling to risk high doses of Sorrow.

It’s said that Madeleine was a Supplier in her Maidenhood, that her Hopes and Dreams were among the strongest.

It’s also said she’s a Supplier of Crone’s Tears now, and that’s why she’s able to have such an extensive stock.

No one’s ever seen Madeleine Cry, but if you look carefully, she has the crescent-shaped mark under one eye – the kind you get from years of Collection.

It’s only ever one eye, of course. The Tears of one eye are Cried for others, but the Tears from the other eye are for yourself.