The Unfortunate Miss Fortunes

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Mare Fortune bounded down the stairs of the family home in her ragged blue running shorts just as the wind caught the front door and blew it open, sending coppery dust swirling in. She batted the dust away and looked out, but instead of Mrs Elder’s beat-up front porch across the street, she saw golden sunshine beaming down on a red tiled roof and a fat laughing baby toddling in a dusty road while a tough dark-haired guy chased after it, laughing, too. She sucked in her breath and thought, Crash, and reached out into the sunlight for him, but he vanished, him and the baby and the red tiled roof and the sunshine, and it was just boring old Duckpond Street under cloudy skies in Salem’s Fork, West Virginia, with Mrs Elder’s peeling porch across the way, no coppery dust at all.

‘Oh,’ Mare said, feeling bereft and then feeling stupid for feeling bereft. He left you, he’s gone, it’s been five years, you’re over it. She turned to close the heavy door, just as her oldest sister Dee took down their mother’s jewelry chest from the mantel in the living room and, beyond her, their middle sister Lizzie bent over her metallurgy book at the battered dining room table, everything normal, nothing to worry about.

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