They had trouble choosing a song to execute Malakine. The executioner and his chosen chorus had walked up to the bench where the judge, jury, and the headman of Immer village sat.

After a moment of hesitation, I inhaled deeply and reached out and stroked the walls and imagined them trembling with the movement of little furry bodies.

It forced itself to take that last step onto the ferry. Every step further from land felt like falling. Through space, through time, through every place it had ever been.

You and I first met in Sunday art class. A portrait of the Thief (stately, flag-bordered) looked on from above at our class: twenty-five kids, hunched over easels. Identically long plaits trailed down your shoulders and mine, yours raven-black and sleek, mine mousey and more fuzz than plait. You chewed on yours. Once, you looked me in the eye while doing it and said, ‘I hate it.’

Beatriz Nogueira is fifteen years old when her life ends.

That’s what the post says, each word capitalized as if it’s the goddamn title of a novel or a screenplay, a farce, a fiction.

I still remember the way your lips pursed and your forehead furrowed with that sexy thoughtful look when I asked you: If I go back to when we met, how could I explain it? What would you expect your own self to believe, knowing you as you do?

Pepper soup was the first thing he ate at Zlademic’s, and the first food from home he tried to eat in Groznagrad. He had been only two days out of detention and a few hours from the refugee office, with his resettlement allowance in his pocket and no idea how anything in this strange place worked.

When we are kids, says Stavros, we eat the heart of a wolf and become half-wolves ourselves.

The truth is that the escape plan that once seemed like dire necessity has become, now, a reality we would never change.