In late September, the monarchs flew away. I wanted to paint them. Instead, I rode in Kathy's blue convertible and winced each time their orange and black wings burst on the windshield. As she drove, she adjusted the radio and asked what I wanted for lunch. I finally understood her: she couldn’t feel pain in wings she didn’t have.
     Because she was driving, it couldn’t have been my fault.
     Our destination, Melissa's house, was our favorite meeting place as children. The five of us—Kathy, Melissa, Rachel, Allison, and me—used to congregate in the front lawn under the maples. Around roots thicker than our arms, we dug holes with rusted shovels. Then we filled the pits with water and stirred, pretending to make witches' brew. The rest of us tossed in weeds and pinecones, but Rachel insisted on sacrifices. After capturing mantises, crickets, and grasshoppers, she decapitated them then tore off their legs and cast the pieces in. The precision of her killing amazed me, and now she wants to be a surgeon.
     Under the maples, the five of us had one dream, to live together and grow very long hair. Nothing changed. First, we were girls dreaming women's dreams. Then we were women remembering our childhood. All I wanted was to see those maples again. I thought one glimpse of their height and the shadow lands under their leaves would convince me a little magic from our childhood survived.
     "Melissa wants to cut her hair," Kathy said. I looked at the strawberry-blonde curls cascading past Kathy's shoulders.
     "Why on Earth?" I asked.
     "Don't ask me. Hers is the longest. I would die to have it."
     "I won't let her."
     "Don't worry," she said, "neither will I."
     We came to the old neighborhood and pulled into the driveway where the cul-de-sac ended. "We're here," she said.
     "No," I said.
     The maples were dying; their leaves lost in webs tent worms spun as they devoured. Dead leaves crumbled under the force of wind and insects dancing. Black-faced worms gyrated, their furry bodies slinking and rising. Their webs were held together by a syrupy residue just as filth will bond human hair. No one had bothered to stop them from spreading.
     "I can't believe this," I said.
     "Why not? This has been the worst season. Everything is dying," Kathy said.
     "How could Melissa let it happen?"
     "It wasn't her fault."
     "Then whose fault was it?" I asked. She didn't answer.
     The wind rose up, and a monarch flew into my scattered hair. I flicked it away and pulled the hair out of my eyes.
     "Why did you kill that butterfly?" Kathy asked.
     "I didn't," I said as I wiped the dull pollen off my fingers and onto my jeans. Then I looked down at the driveway and saw the monarch flapping its wings and its body going nowhere.
     Rachel ran out onto the lawn with Melissa close behind her. When the four of us hugged, our hair tangled together. When we separated, we were still pulling strands out of our eyes. We looked at the dying maples for the last time and couldn't leave fast enough.
     We formed a caravan to the house Allison's father had bought for us. It was close to campus, and Allison waited for us there. The house was newly decorated in pink and green, more than large enough for the five of us, and equipped with picture windows, a columnar porch, and bare walls to hang my paintings on.
     "I saved the best room for you," Allison said, and she had. There was so much natural light pouring in that I converted it into a studio right away.
     The neighbors' children welcomed us after we settled into our new home. They brought casseroles their mothers had baked, and Allison wanted to give them something in return. She broke out a package of store-bought chocolate-chip cookies but couldn't decide what to serve them on. Her first thought was the children might break her new dishes. Her second was that if she served the cookies in a dog-food bowl no one would notice.
     But I did. Knowing what Allison had done, how could I blame myself? The cookie incident above all others assured me it wasn’t my fault.

***

     We were lonely. Our beautiful house was spacious, empty. Our families were far away from us. At first, we cleaned the house until it gave off a white, sterile glow, but all that work was just affection wasted on glass cleaner and furniture polish. The windows could only shine so much. We needed something to take care of, something to call our own. I don't know who first mentioned we should adopt pets. Looking back, I believe it was probably Allison's idea. I know it wasn't mine.
     I hated animals, the smell of wet fur, fleas, jagged teeth that bite. But now I believe lonely women are the most dangerous creatures. After what we've been through, I should know.
     "Dogs and cats? No, no, just think what they'll do," I said. "They'll tear this house apart."
     "What else is there?" Melissa asked.
     "Plants," I said, "they clean the air. They take in the sun and won't bark or bite or pee on the carpet."
     "I want a puppy," Allison said.
     "Our new mauve carpet," I said.
     I filled our windowsills with foliage of all kinds: rubber plants, parrot plants, pink splashes, daisies. Any leafy creature that required indirect light and matched our color scheme would do. The plants made the house come alive. They breathed. They rustled. They took only sun from the windows and water from a pail, and they survived.
     I was particularly fond of my red daisy. When it grew its first bud, I suddenly understood what Redon saw when he drew A Flower with a Child's Face. On instinct, I almost took the daisy with me.
     But when it came time for vacation, I had places to go. Melissa and Rachel stayed home.
     "We'll water the plants for you," Melissa said.
     When I came back a week later, all the plants were dead. My daisy's stem was twisted. The leaves were withered. The roots were black. The tiny face of the bud, looking up to sun when I left, now looked to the soil.
     "Over here," I said to Rachel while holding the dead flower over the trash.
     "What?" she asked, barely turning away from the television.
     I touched my finger to the bud. "A child, head down, crying," I said then dropped it into the wastebasket.
     "Oh, I don't know how to tell you. We forgot to water," Melissa said.
     "They bored us so much we let them die," Rachel said.

***

     Next Allison bought blue-green fish that looked pink and metallic when they caught the light. They were beautiful but would kill one another if they lived together in the same bowl. Allison eventually refused to change their water. Rachel thought the fish were stupid -- always still, never dancing. I wasn't surprised the night Melissa went out to dump them into a pond. Only the determined look on her face frightened me. Later, she told me she thought the fish would survive.
     Then my friends, mourning their wasted affections, sought out colorful birds. At first, I was impressed. They even taught their birds to say a few phrases, but Allison was frustrated because her parrot couldn’t say her name. When it eventually said "Melissa," she was furious. Later, the birds proved to be tedious by nature—hollow bones, tiny brains. As Rachel put it, "never strong enough to truly love you."
     I watched in amusement when Melissa went out to the backyard to "set the birds free." Their wings were clipped and they couldn’t fly, but this didn't stop her from trying. She opened the cage doors but couldn’t understand why the birds didn't rush out. Just as Melissa was about to give up, Rachel ran out to help her. One by one, she tossed the birds up into the air. They tried to fly but found themselves stranded on tree branches.
     "Why don't you just give them away?" I shouted out the window.
     They loaded the birds into Kathy's car and went from door to door. But no one would take them.
     Finally, Kathy said, "I'll take care of them."
     I kept wondering what she did with them. Suddenly, they just disappeared, cages and all. About a week later, I heard a strange sound coming from the basement. The light wouldn't come on. So in the dark, I walked down the concrete steps and found the birds at the bottom—starving, starving. The sound? Wings beating on the cages, shrill cries, bird songs. But I'll never forget the voice of Allison's parrot calling, "Melissa, Melissa . . ." over and over and over again.
     I don't know how long I stayed at the bottom of the dark basement listening. I just remember Kathy coming down to lead me away. When we reached the top of the stairs, it was morning.
     "Don't worry. I'll take care of it," she said. After that, the birds truly did disappear.

***

     Late one evening, the five of us stayed up talking about plants, fish, cats, dogs, and birds. We lingered on death, but no one mentioned murder.
     "You realize none of this was my fault?" I asked.
     "Who said it was?" Allison asked.
     Somewhere between night and morning, we decided that children were really the ideal thing—cuddly, affectionate, able to whisper and shout, so responsive to their own names, so in need of love; in short, so human. But we were much too young and carefree to consider motherhood, or so we thought. (Our friends who already had children had just that—children and nothing else.)
     We thought the logical move would be to look for pets more like ourselves. The more human characteristics a creature had, the more valuable it was to us. But that was the trouble. Not even the most expensive, most discriminating pet shops carried animals with the intelligence and sensitivity we desired.
     Soon we found other markets. Or rather, they found us when we took out loans, mortgaged our vehicles, signed up for more credit cards.

***

     We drove to exotic-animal farms where we met skinny men with gleaming eyes and amazing suntans. No one bothered to ask questions. We just looked through cages at beautiful creatures that smelled of death. When we found an animal we adored, the men named their price and flashed gold-toothed smiles. We paid and paid them, placing crumpled bills in their dusty palms. Then we drove away, hoping our precious creatures would survive the journey home.
     But even after visiting the last exotic-animal farm, Kathy found nothing that pleased her.
     Melissa acquired a giant yellow bird with green tail feathers and brown eyes framed by what looked like a woman's lashes brushed with mascara. She said the bird winked at her, and she couldn't resist. It had an amazing vocabulary when she bought it. Although its words rarely made sense, she planned to teach it a song.
     Rachel had purchased a miniature, melon-colored frog. The smiling men made her promise never to take it out of the jar because its skin leaked poison. But she wanted to hold it anyway because its front legs ended in what looked like the soft ivory fingers of an infant.
     "Oh, don't do it, Rachel. You really shouldn't," Kathy said to her.
     "Don't do it. Don't do it," Melissa's bird chanted.
     Every now and then, the tiny, blue-eyed frog stretched its baby fingers. Rachel cooed at it all the way home, but by the time we pulled into the driveway it was dead.
     Allison's white monkey Peeper was the most expensive purchase, the most willful animal, and the hardest to control. We all wanted him, but Allison was the only one who could afford him. Peeper was worth the money because he was childlike. His tail ended in a black tip that matched the color of his eyes. Every now and then, he covered those eyes with hands that looked so human I wanted to hold them. But he refused to stand still long enough for us to catch him. Like a naughty little boy, he tied our hair in knots. The very first night he spent at our house, he crawled out an open window. We never saw him again.

***

     I wasn't going to buy anything, but as we were leaving the last exotic-animal farm one of the men unloaded a plant with long, fine red petals swaying. The delicate petals reminded me of a woman's hair tossed by the wind. The men called it a sensitive plant. The leaves were arranged in patterns of five. When I touched them, they wrapped around one of my fingers like a gossamer fist closing. The yellow center of the petals was spotted blue and brown. The colors made a design that looked like lips and eyes. A womanflower, maybe its peaceful face was just an illusion of color patterns, but it was more than I had hoped for.
     We spent many pleasant mornings on our porch. Melissa showed off her bird, obediently sitting on her shoulder and singing "Silent Night." But once when a bobwhite cried out from the trees, the golden bird beat its wings so rapidly that Melissa's lips bled. She screamed, and I'll never forget the shadow her giant bird cast as it flew away from her.

***

     Our final journey to replace our lost pets was different from our previous journeys. An anonymous caller told Allison about a seller who had discovered a new breed. For the first time, we traveled toward one man and no exotic farm.
     On a street littered with papers and soda bottles, he introduced himself. His right hand shielded his lips as he spoke.
     "I'm a breeder," he said, his voiced hurried. "I'll show you something. What I've got."
     "Maybe some other time," I said.
     "Now, now listen up. Now, here's something you won't see every day," he said.
     "Oh, we might as well. Just to see what he has," Allison said. "We've already come all this way. There's really nothing left to lose."
     When he looked at us, I imagined what he saw—designer clothes. The five of us were full of our parents’ money, strutting down the streets of a strange and crowded city. He was leading us into the poorer neighborhoods. We were ready for adventure, ready to believe anything that got us what we wanted. I caught no mockery in anything he said, no treachery in his blue eyes appraising. When he spoke, he whispered nervously. Only the left half of his mouth was moving.
     Outside a small house, I watched as the old man led my friends away. Melissa occasionally looked back at me, and I feared for her safe return. But there was no reasoning, nothing I could do to stop them.

***

     When it came time, Allison was not waiting in the front as she had promised. So, I reached into my purse and grabbed my pearl-handled nail file as if it could save us all. I knocked on the apartment door. When no one answered, I let myself in. I heard a scream below me and ran down a concrete staircase to find out where the scream had come from. Clutching my nail file tight, I stumbled and almost fell several times. I could hear animals whimpering and smell their terror. When I reached the bottom of the staircase, I saw Rachel laughing and holding her checkbook. The breeder was beside her.
     "No checks. No use for them here," he said to her.
     "So how do I pay you? We want those baby doggies. Oh please, can we take them to a good home. But I don't have much cash on me," Rachel said.
     "I'll take the cash," he said. "Nothing else. Maybe your rings. Maybe her watch. Maybe your car—no checks."
     "He can't have the car," I said.
     "We'll talk later," Rachel said through clinched teeth. Turning to the old man, she said, "What's it going to be?"
     "What do you have on you?" he asked.
     "You're both insane!" I shouted to Rachel. But she carelessly waved a hand in my direction dismissing my words as I uttered them.
     The smell of animals grew stronger with the smell of urine, the smell of rot, the smell of neglect. What did Rachel say to the old man, "baby doggies"? "Doggies?” We already tried "doggies." We didn't like them. I thought we had moved on to more interesting creatures. However, I was curious to find out what new breed my friends had so madly fallen in love with.
      One by one, Rachel pulled her rings off with considerable effort. She tried to be swift about the deed but couldn’t. A silver ring with a large purple stone caught on her right hand's middle finger. She was still attempting to loosen it when I ran into the next room where Allison, Kathy, and Melissa were saying, "Oh, oh, come here!" They went on, not realizing I was there.
     "Oh, look at it! Isn't it cute."
     "Sweet little things."
     "Come here! Come here!"
     "Oh, I've never seen anything like them. Precious. Just precious."
     I went deeper into the little room that was just concrete floors, concrete walls, concrete ceilings, neon lights buzzing, no windows. But I still couldn't see the animals. Allison, Kathy, and Melissa were crowded around them in a half-circle of admiration. The animals were apparently backed up against the wall.
     "Oh, they're perfect, perfect.”
     "Are you hungry, sweetheart? Are you hungry? Well, here you go."
     "Melissa, we don't even know what to feed them. He hasn't told us yet. Melissa!"
     "Oh, look, he likes it. Look, look, she wants one too."
     "Oh, let me give her one. Let me give it to her. Over here, honey. Over here!"
     "Good girl. Good girl!"
     When I broke through their little circle, nothing could have prepared me for what I saw. The animal they fed was no dog. It was a little blonde-haired girl. She had blue eyes and must have been only three or four years old. Her clothes were rags. Allison tried to give her more food, but she was too shy to take it. So, Allison put it on the floor beside her, and she garbed it up. Such a lithe creature! She turned away from us and hid her face in the wall as she devoured scraps not fit for a dog. Then she turned back around for more. Her eyes met mine and she crawled toward me.
     "What's happened to her? Someone help me get her off the floor," I said.
     Then the old man came in.
     "These are children," I said.
     He just looked at me.
     "No, no, these are doggies," Melissa said.
     The breeder, still looking at me, said, "You are both right. These are dog-children. The first and the last of their kind."
     I'm not the one who believed him, but I allowed my friends to purchase the boy and the girl. At that moment, my only intention was to get them out of the filth. Determined to have no part in my friends’ madness, I ignored the children. But during the ride home, the little girl would sit only with me. She ignored Melissa. She whimpered when Rachel touched her. She ran from Allison. She flinched when Kathy patted her head and refused the company of her brother.
      We didn't even bother to name them. From the first, they were just "the boy" and "the girl." I never cared for the boy. He was the wild one, knocking over chairs, begging for our dinners, licking our hands. My friends adored him. However, they were disappointed by the girl. Rachel complained she was too calm, too quiet.
     "Why does she want only you?" Kathy asked me. I couldn't tell her why.

***

     For six months, I watched the news to listen for kidnappings. No child lost or stolen fit the description of our dog-children. And they became more like animals every day. I began to think maybe the old man had accomplished something amazing. The dog-children could do things normal children couldn’t. Nothing could account for their instincts and speed. They had the ability to hear sounds long before we could. And the things normal children could do, they couldn’t—for instance, speaking, reasoning, understanding. And to my surprise they grew much faster than children. Isn't one year to a human the same as seven to a dog? Maybe they grew so fast because we fed them and when we found them they were starving, starving.
     From the beginning, I knew the girl was a better creature than the boy. If I left my paintbrushes scattered on the floor, she straightened them in a line. My exotic flower fascinated her. She touched its stems and blew on its petals. The leaves grasped her slender fingers. However, she understood not to touch the plant without my consent.
     One evening, she watched me paint. I dropped my pallet on the floor, and she handed the palette back to me. When I looked down at her, she was using the spilled paint to color her own picture. The image looked like trees, rainbows, stars, and smiling faces. From that moment on, I knew I had to protect the girl.
     At night she and I sat alone in my room. I tried to teach her to speak. I said short words like "sun" or "star" over and over again. She watched attentively then moved her lips, but no words came out. Walking was more difficult. I pulled her up under her shoulders, and she moved her legs. But she couldn’t support herself because her legs were twisted from crawling and wouldn’t straighten.
     Every now and then Rachel came into the room and said, "Teaching your dog tricks again? The boy can leap over the sofa and roll down the stairs in a ball. What can she do? We should have left her where we found her."
     One night Allison and I left the dog-children alone so we could walk at the park. We admired the city lights reflecting on the pond's still surface. We waded out into the waters up to our ankles but were afraid to go deeper because the black waters mirrored the night sky and we couldn’t see our toes. Then we heard a sound like a wounded animal making its way through the fallen leaves. The sound became louder. The animal moved closer. We put our shoes on without tying the laces and ran toward the car. We were half way there when we found the boy sitting in the middle of our path. I couldn't stand to look at him. Allison tried to comb the hair out of his eyes, but he was in no mood for affection. He clawed her arms with the sharp nails he refused to let us trim.
     We were silent on the way home. Of course, we both knew what it meant. The park was at least a mile away from the house, and the boy had tracked us there.

***

     At home we found the girl whimpering under the kitchen table. The boy ran circles and circles around the living room. The food bowls were empty, and I went to fill them. Allison stopped me and said, "No, we have to punish them."
     "Them?" I asked.
     "Them."
     "But the girl, what did she do?"
     "That's not the point," Allison said, hurling the empty bowl at the running boy. The bowl hit him on the ear, and he turned around. He moved toward Allison. She took a step back behind me and closed her eyes. The room was silent until the girl broke the awkward moment by howling. Allison chased the girl and the boy into the dark basement.
     Later that night, Allison and I approached Rachel, but she wouldn't believe us.
     "Oh, he must have been in the back of the car," she said.
     "You think we just imagined it?" Allison asked.
     "Well, next time lock the doors," Kathy said.
     "He tore through the screen," I said.

***

     From then on, we never opened the windows, and whenever I left the house the girl stood in my studio doorway. At first, I thought she was waiting for me. Then I realized she was guarding the door. If no one was watching, the boy ran for the sensitive plant. The girl did her best to keep him away from it.
     For the first time in our lives, we knew fear. My friends no longer liked the boy. He bit them. His teeth were like razors slipping on their legs or shattered glass penetrating their fingers.
     Everything changed the night he bit me. I was eating French fries and watching television. Occasionally, I gave the girl a piece of my dinner. I didn't feed her because she reminded me of a desperate animal. Rather, I fed her because she never begged.
     The boy was different. He whimpered, pawed, and ran circles around me. I couldn't forgive him for disturbing my dinner. So, every time he came near, I pushed him away from my plate.
     The last time I decided to push him harder. I heard his neck pop. Then he growled and sunk his teeth into my hand. I screamed for him to let go. He wouldn't. I called to Rachel, Allison, Melissa, and Kathy to help me. They didn't. When I saw my torn skin hanging and the blood seeping out from his mouth, I decided the boy and the girl weren’t human. Suddenly, the old man was eccentric but a genius. We were the saviors, taking two freakish creatures away from certain death in the outside world where doctors would dissect them.
     The girl ran to me, but I found no comfort in her affections. I put my hand in cold water then walked to my studio to paint my flower. The girl must have been close behind me, but I didn’t hear her. The boy must have followed her, but I didn’t know he lurked in the dark hallway.
     I stared at my exotic flower. It grew more beautiful, more feminine every day. I touched the leaves, and they held my finger. How could this plant be so human while the children outside my door were more animals than people? For a moment, I thought the flower smiled, but I must have been dreaming.
     Dreaming, because I was awakened by a growl. There was a pounding on the door, and suddenly it was off its hinges. The boy came in and flashed a toothy grin. The girl jumped on his back and grabbed onto his face. The next thing I knew, her fingers were in his mouth, and she was screaming.
     I ran toward her, but the look on her face told me she wanted me to stay away. The boy lunged toward me. The girl tried to hold him back. He was stronger than she, and she failed.
     He ran at me, I dodged him, and he crashed into my flower. The daisy hit the floor. Its face and petals were decapitated from the stem. The leaves clinched then relaxed.
     I didn't even feel the boy's teeth going into my hand. He bit me again and then scurried away on all fours. The girl remained. Weeping for my flower, I realized she sat at my feet.
     "Get out," I said. "Get out of here!"
     She didn't budge.
     "I hate animals—the smell of wet fur, fleas, jagged teeth that bite," I said as I kicked her away from me.
     "I never bit you," she said.
     I begged her to repeat it, but she only barked, whimpered, and rolled over and over as if she never had spoken at all. Then she looked at me with her blue eyes, the eyes of that breeder.
     I found Rachel and said, "He sold his children."
     My friends tried to convince me I was wrong.
     "Look at him. You call him human?" Rachel asked, pointing to the boy.
     "I really can't believe he murdered your beautiful flower," Melissa said.
     "The girl?" Kathy said. " If she was human, she would have talked by now."
     "Why don't they talk?" Rachel asked. "Why don't they understand what we're saying? Why does he bite us?"
     "I'll tell you why," Allison said, "they're not even human beings. That's why."
     I heard the dog-children howling and the voices of Allison, Rachel, Kathy, and Melissa convincing me it was also my fault. They kept saying I was wrong, that the girl and the boy were never children. But I knew. I knew.
     "I'll take care of them," Kathy whispered.
     "I'll come with you," Rachel said.
     "Don't do it," I said, pleading. But there was no reasoning, no way to stop them.
     Allison held me back, her fingernails clawing my arms.
     Rachel and Kathy led the dog-children out of the house and into the backyard. The floodlights went out, and from my side of the window I heard the girl's voice pleading.
     "I never bit you. I never bit you," she said.
     "Did she say something?" Kathy asked.
     "No," Rachel said, "not a thing."
     "I never . . ."
     "But I thought I heard something," Kathy said.
     "It must have been me," Rachel said.
     "Never . . ."
     By then, not even I was listening. The lights in the neighbors' houses were coming on. Sirens were howling in the distance. The neighbors’ children were pressed against their bedroom windows and scratching on the glass like animals wanting to escape the houses they always come back to.