May-Linda woke up to empty garbage dumpsters being dropped at the waste station at the end of the road. It was Sunday, and trash pickup for the week. She propped herself on her elbows. The smell of dew seeped through the separations in the window frame. Soon, the heat would suck the dewdrops from the tall grass dry. She peered into a miniature front bedroom and rubbed her face. Hazeltina had tucked the dolls in last night, but now they were perched around the table. 

“You awake?” May-Linda whispered. Hazeltina squirmed and stretched her legs in her sleeping bag. May-Linda nudged her with her toes.

“Huh?” Hazeltina sat up, streaks of brown hair stuck to her forehead. She turned to her sister with closed eyes.

“Did you wake up earlier and play with them?”

“No,” she whined and flopped to the floor.

“Hmm. Gareth could have snuck in. Aren’t you hot?”

Hazeltina whipped her head again into the sleeping bag. In the distance, their mother called, “Pancakes!” and her eyes shot open. They rushed to get dressed for weekend breakfast, their mother’s specialty. At the firepit, she cooked over the grill. Their mom wore a faded blue and white sundress and flip-flops. Her hair was pulled up in a short ponytail at the nape of her neck. She looked tired, but smiled when the sisters approached.

“I see the magic word worked! Could you please go find your brother, though? He wasn’t at the helm when I called for him,” she said. She grilled pancakes and swatted flies from the ones hovering over a stack on a deformed paper plate.

“Can we eat first?” Hazeltina whined. “Dinner was forever-ago.”

“Get him, and you’ll have breakfast.” She lowered her head, and her dark eyes said she meant it.

“The pit?” May-Linda eyed Hazeltina, who nodded.

The girls darted down a path that waded through the obstacle course behind the dried Seaside Miniature Golf. Two mustard-yellow sports cars were enveloped in vines, a rusty green pickup, and a white van dotted with corroded holes. A decrepit yacht, fishing boats, and a couple of canoes buoyed the imaginations of the siblings. Their father considered it all a bonus. It was also the dumping ground for old game displays, and a turquoise sea serpent lay in pieces, its face a faded jade and bubble-gum pink display of anger and fear.

A forest of tall, thin pines waved to them and surrounded the property. The walkway became overgrown with branches and bushes. May-Linda walked in front, pushing aside the bigger tree limbs for Hazeltina. When the path opened up, they had reached the power line trails.

The sisters followed the fine dusty trail to the edge, where another dumping ground of discarded camping supplies, chicken coops, and household garbage had long escaped the shredded trash bags half-buried by gravel and weeds. Black and white crinkled remnants surrounded them as if leading the way.

Gareth searched through the abandoned items in the pit. Greasy dark bangs covered his eyes. He wore the same clothes as the day before–a pair of worn jeans with a hole over the knee and a dirty undershirt. A cast iron pan and a faded garden flag with a butterfly lay close to him. The sisters stopped at the edge. Hazeltina put her hands on her hips.

“Fishing?” She called with a smirk.

“One of these days, Dad will take me,” he said.

“By then, we’ll be back at school.” May-Linda said. “Any finds?”

Gareth shook his head.

“Same as always,” she said.

“Not true. People either leave things or shoot at them.”

“Are you going to collect bullet casings, then?”

“They have potential,” he said.

“You sound like Dad. Everything has a use,” May-Linda said, her index finger pointed at the sky. “Are you hungry ‘cause we are, and Mom sent us to find you.”

“Yeah, and I’m starving,” Hazeltina said.

Gareth jumped off the pallet, landing in a cloud of dirt.

“Did you mess with our dollhouse?” she asked as they walked.

“I don’t care about your baby mansion,” he said and kicked the gravel.

*

“Thought you had disappeared.” Their mother stood up from the firepit as they emerged from the forest. A wrinkled piece of foil covered the pancakes. “Did you sleep all right, honey?” She tousled Gareth’s hair, but he jerked away. 

“You aren’t scared over there on the ship?”

Gareth shrugged. “There was a cricket inside all night.”

“They’re good fortune,” she said.

“No luck, just mice,” he huffed and sat down on a tree trunk that framed the firepit.

She handed him a paper plate with two coaster-sized pancakes.

“Can I have more, please?” he asked.

“We need to save some for Dad.”

Gareth scowled.

“Where is Daddy?” Hazeltina asked.

“Off making plans.”

“He’s not going to eat those,” Gareth said.

*

Their father was gone past dusk. Hazeltina peered through the observatory window. A dim light shone in the small ticket office and pirate ship.

“What does mom do at night?” she asked.  

“Mom likes to read. Or maybe she’s planning her next quilt.”

“Do you think she gets lonely? Dad makes a lot of plans,” she said.

“She might want to be alone. Sometimes, I do.” May-Linda shifted from her reading pose, where she leaned her feet above her on the wall. She inspected the tiny rooms. “Did you find more things?” She lifted the lid of a minuscule royal blue cooking pot. “This is similar to ours.”

“Everything is—like magic,” Hazeltina said.

Many of the furnishings resembled those stored in the barn. There was a red mixer, a set of brown plates with sunflowers, and ceramic mugs in their favorite colors: cotton candy pink, school bus yellow, and midnight blue. 

“How did these get here?”

“Every morning, something new similar to what we have appears,” Hazeltina said. “Look at our bedroom.”

When May-Linda peered in, she saw a bed table with a small stack of books enveloped in a clear covering, like hers. “It’s as if this is a dream playing out before us,” she said, paging through the thumb-sized book, The Girl from Outer Space.

They had taken to sleeping with the stringed lights on the dollhouse. It created an aura of peace and safety on moonless nights when the silence and darkness of the country made her feel like nobody else existed. She awoke to Hazeltina shaking her. “What?” May-Linda started to protest but was shushed.

“Listen,” Hazeltina said in her lowest whisper, and so they did. She curled up next to her sister, and they waited. In the Christmas illuminations’ glow, a faint conversation, a hint of an argument, reached their ears. The father figure floated to the front bedroom window. He seemed to look at them through his black, threaded gaze. When the lights flickered, nothing stood there.

*

The sisters fell asleep and curled against each other on the floor. Hazeltina stretched her legs, and May-Linda propped herself up. She heard shuffling and murmurs. The father figure was not in the house when she crawled over, and the tiny sounds stopped.

What is this? May Linda thought.

“Should we tell mom?” Hazeltina asked, as if reading her mind.

“I’m not sure yet,” she said.

Hazeltina rose and brushed her dark, sweaty bangs off her face. She kneeled at the back of the toy and picked up the sister dolls. “You and me,” she whispered to herself. One doll was shorter than the other with corresponding hair length. The taller figure was dressed in ripped cut-off jean shorts and a t-shirt, and the smaller one donned a faded sundress. In the dolls’ bedroom, a small box of a wardrobe held clothes. She guided it to search through them and had it select a long dress and poised it in front of the mirror on the cabinet door. It admired itself when Hazeltina gasped and reached for her.

“What’s the matter?” May-Linda grabbed her sister’s hand. There was nothing.

“Something blurry appeared in the mirror.” Her eyes were wide with a hint of tears which she wiped quickly with her palm. In a lower voice, she said, “There’s something in there watching us.”

*

When their dad arrived, he honked the knock-knock pattern. He parked right beside the empty fountain which had a whale leaping into the air.

“Who’s ready for work?” he bellowed, climbing out of the pickup’s cab. The family milled around him. He was strong with a beard, and he always wore a hat.

“What’s all that?” Hazeltina pointed to a strapped pile of boards and beams.

“That is our house,” he said. “Bestowed by the digital universe.” He bowed.

“Huh?”

“Facebook marketplace?” Gareth said, as if struck by a brilliant idea.

“Bingo,” their dad said, with a finger gun. “Someone wanted this off their hands, so we’re taking it.”

“I don’t want the kids climbing all over that,” she said. Their mother crossed her arms and gazed at the ground, shaking her head.

He looked hurt, then narrowed his expression. “They’ll never learn a good work ethic that way.”

“It’s not safe.” She took a step toward him. He turned and loosened a strap.

Lowering the first wall from the trailer consumed most of the day. Gareth climbed to the top and threaded a thick, twisted rope through it with his father’s guidance to make a pulley they could maneuver from the ground. When the wall was horizontal, the five took baby steps to the rectangular wooden stakes of their home’s foundation.

Their energy was drained when the first partition was on the ground and set at the location of their future home. The cicadas continued rattling their skins off. They were just getting started.

“At this rate, we’re looking at a cold winter outside,” he said.

*

Gareth spent his days preparing the topmost panel. When it was ready, he and his father would yell for the rest of the family to help guide the wall down and carry it to its new location. The work was exhausting. At night, their parents argued in the ticket office.

When their father was away making plans, peace fell over the property. Gareth and Hazeltina resumed shopping at the mall and added to their collection of treasures. She scored a deluxe Trapper Keeper, the kind with a zipper and handle. Gareth brought their mother a wooden heart which she hung in the ticket office window. He gave May-Linda a tiny set of dinner candles.

“I know you like the miniature stuff too,” he said.

She and Hazeltina placed the table candelabra at the center of the dining room table and went to bed. Hours later, May-Linda awoke to a thin plume of smoke. The white tablecloth with the red and yellow flowers was ablaze. Then flames lapped at the curtains. Hazeltina blew at the small fires. Her breath only made them grow until May-Linda snuffed everything out with her sleeping bag.

“We can’t tell anybody about this,” she told her. In the moon’s glow, they carried the toy house to the junkyard, lights intact, and left it with the decaying cars. She watered the covered mound using a garden watering can, just to be sure. When they returned to the lighthouse, there was an audible silence.

“I feel like I’m missing someone,” Hazeltina said. They sat cross-legged around where the dollhouse had stood. “Do you think it was trying to send a message?”

“How could it?”

Hazeltina shrugged.

“There are so many things we don’t understand,” May-Linda said. 

Rising, she peered into the night; the full moon illuminated the playing field and their dumping ground. Amid the cars, boats, and old game displays, something blinked, then blinked again, and she assured herself it was merely a trick of the night.

Editor: Lucy Cafiero