Sadie
Sadie dreams she is strapped into the backseat of her parents’ car, and suddenly both of her parents disappear. No one is driving, but the car speeds ahead. She has had this dream before, but each time she has it, the dream feels new. She pulls at the buckles of her seatbelt, but they don’t budge. Only her mother and father know how to undo them. Sadie yells. She looks out past the empty two front seats where the highway is a long, dark ribbon, extending far away. 
          When she wakes up, she pulls off the covers. Her heart races and her legs are hot, like she has a fever. Her sister Libby is asleep on the other side of the room. They have identical bedsheets with red and white stripes like peppermints. A gift from their mother the year before. Sadie likes that she and her sister have this in common.

The next day is Valentine's day, and Libby and Sadie go to school. In Sadie’s class, they go one by one to hand out valentines, and it’s Maria’s turn. She is the tallest out of all the girls in their class. She walks through the rows without smiling, passes a candy to each person, and she looks like a flower girl Sadie saw last summer at her aunt’s wedding; there is something so sombre about her and about that girl at the wedding too, and she wants to reach out and touch her, she doesn’t know why. She pictures her hand going right through Maria, like she is a ghost. 
          Maria hands out valentines like that girl threw the petals. She just brings up her hand and lets them fall, like she is a puppet and her wrist is connected to a string. Her mother made the valentines. Everyone’s mothers did, except for Sadie; her father made them. He bought lollipops and little chocolate bars and attached notes that say things like: You are soooo sweet! And Won’t you be my valentine? When Sadie hands hers out she blushes, she can’t help it, it just feels sort of silly and everybody’s eyes are on her, and she blushes especially hard when she gets to Carlos. She picks a special candy for him. The one that looks suitable for a boy. The wrapper is blue, not pink like all the others. Sadie places it in his palm and lingers there, she even turns slightly towards his desk, where he has arranged his pencils in a line. He throws her blue-wrapped candy into his pile without reading the note that says hugs and kisses and then he sticks out his tongue at her. He is eating cinnamon candies, and his tongue is red like a brick and she can smell the cinnamon. “Ew,” she says, and she laughs and keeps walking, handing out whatever candies she grabs from her little bag, she doesn't care who gets what. Walking up and down the aisles like that she feels like a celebrity, she wants this moment to last forever, and she is rounding the corner of the last row and hoping Carlos is watching her because her hair is in a long braid today, because it is a special occasion. But as she rounds the corner she sees Maria, who is looking down at all of her candies, almost through them. 

Libby
At recess Anna tells Libby that kissing Thomas was like kissing a pelican. She makes her lips small and stiff and pointed. 
          “Like this,” she says, and leans in towards Libby and closes her eyes. 
          Libby screams with laughter. 
          “Like a beak,” Anna says, and her eyes sparkle like icy blue jewels. 
          Libby wants to know more about what the kiss was like, but she doesn’t ask. For example, where did they put their hands? Her older cousin says that hands are the most important part of kissing and everybody forgets that. Hands can go anywhere, she says, butts, ears, hair, boobs. Libby shivers. Anna is more experienced because she was held back a grade. 
          That day at recess they play Murderer. Murderer is when they accuse someone of being the murderer, and then they all run away from that person. It is like tag or hide and seek, only the murderer has to stay the murderer for the whole time, and each person she or he touches has to lie down like they are dead. Some of the boys, instead of touching lightly, pretend they are actually killing, like shooting a rifle or swinging an axe into the person's head or a sword into their back. Almost all the boys do it and Anna is the only girl who copies them, and at first it made Libby a little afraid of her. Before they became friends Anna once found her hiding in the plastic tunnel and Libby froze, she had nowhere to move. Anna crouched and stuck her hand out and pretended to slice Libby’s throat with her fingertips as she made a hissing sound that was supposed to be the sound of blood spraying from Libby’s neck. Dead, she pronounced. Libby had laid down. 
          “How’s your neck?” Anna had asked Libby at lunch. They were eating baked potatoes. Libby was waiting for hers to cool down, but Anna spooned the food into her mouth and chewed with her mouth open because it was so hot. 
          “Not too bad,” Libby said, “but I lost a lot of blood.”

The day after Valentine’s day all of the kids are playing Murderer but Libby and Anna don’t care, they’re too old for that now, they sit on the side lines and watch them scramble around like rats and they pretend to share a cigarette. Their secret delicacy. Even though it is cold, most of the snow has melted in the last few days, and there are wide patches of thawing ground. Their breath comes out in clouds, and they blow it out in front of them, watching the vapor dissolve. Libby has seen people smoking, she knows how it looks. Anna’s mom smokes, so Anna is an expert. Sometimes Libby gets close to her and her clothes have that smell, sort of sweet and chemical. Libby likes the smell because it belongs to Anna. Anna pretends to spark the lighter, and even cups her hand over the invisible end. She takes a deep breath in, closes her eyes to savour it. 
          “Here,” she says, handing it to Libby. 
          Libby’s hands shake. She makes her mouth into an O that is either too big or too small, she doesn’t know how big the cigarette is supposed to be, she just tries to do what Anna did, but Anna isn’t even looking at her, she’s looking out at Thomas, who is the murderer, and he has just decapitated Riley. 
          “I decapitated you!” he yells, pointing at Riley. She is curled into a ball on the ground below him, and her new jeans, which they know are new because she told them, have dirt all up and down in streaks on the butt. 
          Anna sticks her hand out for Libby to pass the cigarette back to her. Libby pinches her fingers together and they do a hand-off. Anna shakes it a little. 
          “To get the ashes off,” she says. 
          “Yeah,” Libby says, like she knows. 
          They still have more recess time, so they play cause of death. It is Anna’s favourite game.
          “Old age, old age, old age,” Libby declares, pointing one by one to three of their classmates, spread out across the yard.
          “Boring!” Anna says. 
           “Fine,” Libby says, “you go. What about Riley?” Libby asks, pointing over to the sandbox, where she is sitting on the wooden edge, watching everyone. 
          “Hm,” Anna says, “Rock avalanche.”
          They laugh. Libby pictures a mountain face crumbling, rocks falling, jagged edges and red dust. 
          “Or maybe drowning,” Anna says, and now Libby thinks of a dark lake she saw once when she visited her cousins. It was night time, the lake was black and bottomless but people were jumping in, and when the moon hit the water, the white light split and scattered on the surface.
          “Randy?” Anna asks her, pointing to where he is hanging upside down from a bar, his knees bent and his head swaying, his face flushed pink with rushing blood. It always makes Libby nervous when she picks the cause of death. She can only imagine so many. But Anna has an endless supply. Shipwreck. Coma. Kidney disease. Heart attack. Plane crash. Leeches. Paralysis. Punctured space-suit.
          “Lice,” Libby says.
          “What?” Anna says, “You can’t die of lice. I had lice last year.”
          “Oh,” Libby says. 
          “That’s ok. Try again.” 
          She thinks about ways she has seen people die in the movies. 
          “Poison,” she says.
          “Nice,” Anna says, “you’re getting better.” 
          “What about me?” she asks. She turns and Libby turns and they face each other.
          Libby laughs. “You?”
          “Yeah, me. Do one for me. And I’ll do yours.”
          Libby’s heart rattles in her chest. 
          “I don’t know,” she says, because she really doesn't. The bell rings, it is the end of recess. 
          “Think of one,” she says. All the kids who were laying down because they were killed get back up again and run towards the door. Mrs. Matthews is holding it open. 
          She looks back at Anna. Old age, she thinks to herself. But that wouldn’t satisfy Anna.
          “Dog attack,” she says. Her face is hot. She imagines German shepherds with snarls of black gums and long fangs. She wants the game to be over now, she doesn’t want her to pick hers.
          “Cool,” Anna says. 
          Anna closes her eyes and puts her hands out, her palms open, and pretends to scan Libby. She hums as she moves her fingers around in the space between them. Her eyes fly open and she grips Libby’s knees with her fingers. 
          “You. Are going. To die. Of thirst,” she says, her eyes wild and clear in the amber light.
          She doesn’t wait for Libby to respond. She gets up and starts walking toward the door, where Mrs. Matthews is looking at them, they are the last ones in the school yard, and she is tapping her foot with one hand on her hip. 

Sadie
Libby and Sadie and their father go to Aunt Terry’s house for dinner. Aunt Terry likes for them to dress up, so they wear their matching silver dresses with big silver bows in the back. When their mother bought them these dresses, she said they looked like angels. Sadie spreads her invisible wings, but no one notices. Libby tugs on her dress and says she hates matching, can’t she wear something different? Their father says no and Libby groans but Sadie is smiling inside. She likes wearing the same thing as her sister. Silver reminds Sadie of Christmas, of moonlight, of her mother’s earrings, which are on her ears somewhere in Paris right now. She pictures her mother sitting in a restaurant all by herself with her hair done up, her long white neck, her sparkling teeth, one leg crossed over the other beneath her black skirt. Sadie wonders if her mother is homesick. She sends her a secret message with her mind. She pictures the message like a slip of paper sailing through the air and across the world. 
          While their father talks to aunt Terry in the kitchen, the girls are in the living room taking turns standing over the heater vent. Their dresses flare, the fabric stiff and hovering. They look like upside down tulips. 
          Aunt Terry has automatic salt and pepper grinders that make a mechanical whirring sound when you press a button. It makes Sadie feel as though she is on a spaceship. 
          “More,” she tells her father. He presses the button again and pepper floats onto her mashed potatoes. 
	She loves the way it looks, the pepper drifting down, like ashes, like soft black snow. Her father tells a story about finding wild horses in a field when he was younger. Aunt Terry is listening and Libby looks down at her plate and in her face there is a certain kind of sadness. She picks up her glass of water and drinks the whole thing. Sadie thinks about the horses. She closes her eyes as she chews and pictures their speckled backs, bulging eyes, velvet noses, hot breath. She focuses hard; she wants to dream about them tonight. She tries to ward off the possibility of other dreams, of nightmares. 

Olivia Murphy-Major is a writer living in Montreal, Canada. Her work has appeared in The Saturday Evening Post, Yolk Literary Magazine, Catamaran Literary Reader, Soliloquies Anthology, and pixie literary magazine.