“
Thirty more years pass and Macy wakes up for the fourteen-thousandth, six-hundredth, and thirteenth time. She hugs Everett with her wrinkling arms, and her mother once again wishes Macy a happy sixth birthday. Macy stays home from school and shutters her windows and locks her door and refuses to go to the bathroom and takes all of her toys off of the shelf and refuses to eat and keeps Everett on a leash and unplugs the television and calls her grandmother and her Uncle Mark and her teacher so that she can get the homework she missed and keeps Everett away from her birthday cake and asks her mom not to use the garbage disposal and cleans up the pizza that someone dropped near the house and carries a rock that she can throw at the squirrel and joins her father on Everett’s walk and locks the back door and takes every precaution in order to stop Everett from running away for the fourteen-thousandth, six-hundredth, and fourteenth time. But this time the radio says that a tornado is coming and that everyone needs to evacuate their houses. In the confusion, Everett escapes.
“Tomorrow I’ll break the radio,” Macy says to herself.
—
An excerpt from The Girl Who Could Live In Yesterday, the planned follow-on if The Little Particle That Could sells enough copies. I start work shopping the story tonight. I know the comment I’m going to get is, “Yeah, this one is really depressing.”
It’s the process.
