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gravity.
    Finn thought, I don’t know what that is, but it’s not ugly.
    â€œBig deal,” said Derek, but his voice was as high as if he’d sucked on a helium balloon.
    â€œShut up, Derek,” said Finn.
    â€œI’m not Derek. I’m Spike.”
    â€œShut up anyway,” Finn said. Let them surround him here. Let them start punching now. That would be okay. That would be just fine.
    One of Priscilla’s hands twitched, and Finn knew she had been stung. She glared at him. “What are you looking at, Spaceman?”

Roza
JUMP
    ROZA DUG AROUND IN A BOX OF RITZ, PULLED OUT A cracker, nibbled. If she wanted, she could go to the kitchen and pick a piece of fruit from the bowl piled high with apples and pears, peaches and plums. But the fruit in the kitchen looked too perfect; she was afraid of it. Afraid that the man had tainted it somehow, ruined it, that she would bite into the soft cheek of a peach and fall away dead.
    Like the prisoner she was, she lived on bread and water, though she was sure the water must be drugged.
    â€œZijem na chlebie i wodzie, jestem niewolnikem tutaj,” she said. Even terrible things sounded better in Polish. She had triedto teach Sean and Finn. Easy words—cat, dog, table, washing machine. In Polish, nouns were gendered; sometimes there were two ways to say the same thing—kot or kotek for cat—and sometimes just one. That makes no sense, Sean had said. Why are tables masculine? Why is a washing machine a girl? What kind of crazy language is this? Not so crazy as English, she’d told him. Little words everywhere. ‘A’ and ‘the’ and ‘this” and ‘that.’ Useless! Like dirt under fingernails! He’d laughed and said, You have point.
    â€œI have no point,” she told him, though Sean was not here, though no one was. She examined her hands, the useless, boneless things dangling off the ends of her wrists. Not so long ago, they’d been lean and strong, able to crack a nut with a pinch, able to press a seed deep into the earth with one stab of a finger. But they were not used to such idleness and had gone limp with despair. She fumbled with the cracker box, and crumbs rained down over the coffee table and the carpet. Anywhere else, that would be something to do, a necessary task, cleaning up after herself. But she didn’t even need to do that much. She could go to bed, and in the morning, every crumb would be gone, as if the man had a flock of birds or a parade of biddable ants on staff.
    She might as well be that picture over the fireplace.
    She shoved the cracker box away and turned on the TV. She scrolled through chat shows, cooking shows, home decorating shows, cop shows, movies. She tossed the remote to the couch. She never really watched the TV, but sometimes liked to leave it on, liked to hear the voices so she didn’t feel so alone. She hadnever been alone before. Though she’d had her own apartment at the O’Sullivan place, someone was always home. Sean. Finn. The little barn cat that hated the barn and always found a way to sneak inside. Even Charlie Valentine, who would come over looking for one of his wandering chickens, or for a game of cards. His favorite was a type of poker where the players held a single card to their own foreheads so that everyone could see what you had but you. They bet pennies and sometimes cookies. Seeing Sean—enormous, serious Sean—with a card stuck to his forehead always struck her as so funny that she made absurd bets, pushing whole stacks of pennies to the center of the table, eating the cookies before they made it into the pot. Sean’s mouth would twitch, a smile, and he would warn her that if she didn’t watch it, she would lose.
    â€œWatch what?” she’d said.
    â€œWatch yourself,” he said.
    â€œHow? I roll eyes back in head?”
    She didn’t care about losing, because Charlie always won. And she