The Poppy Fields

by Nikki Erlick

They carry the pain that comes for us all, the weight ultimately thrust upon everyone.

This sleep will not make things right, on that they can all agree. It will not give sense to the senseless; it will not fill the yawning hole.

Somehow, PJ always managed to beat the alarm by one minute.

Barky

Ava knew that her hands looked ugly. But they’d still built her a beautiful life.

For someone rather neat and organized in her waking life, Ellis slept like a sloppy starfish, limbs akimbo across the mattress.

And she would watch the relief melt the strain in their faces. Other people needed this, too, they would think. Other people had made the same choice.

“Maybe the sign was that we ended up next to each other in the bathroom. Maybe that was fate.” Or maybe it was just a coincidence, Ava thought. Surely fate would have known not to offer a road trip to Ava.

“So, by the time I decided to give driving a shot, I was almost thirty, and . . . you know how it’s easy for little kids to climb up a tree or roll down a hill? But then, when you’re older, you suddenly find that you have vertigo and you’re terrified of breaking your neck?”

Perhaps because she didn’t see herself as stranded. It was true that she didn’t have a flight, nor did she have a car, nor did she really have any plan beyond the basic urge to just go. But someone who’s stranded is stuck. They’re trapped, immobile, hopeless. And Sky was none of those things.

(Her parents explained their decision quite simply: they were tired, and they’d run out of money.)

Ava knew that people would always form their opinions of small towns, especially in her part of the country, but she took pride in the fact that even the tiniest of towns around where she grew up—compact communities with little more than a grocery, a gas station, and a church—often had a public library, too. It was one of the essentials, like food and fuel, the nourishment of body and mind and soul. No matter how small of a city she lived in, no matter how quiet a life she led, Ava never felt bored or trapped or ignorant. She could travel the globe or travel through history, feel love or hate or envy or hope, any day she pleased, any time she checked out a new book.