Michelle Cuevas

“Change is the nature of nature,'" she read. "'For example, stars expand as they grow older. They grow from a star, to a red super-giant, to a supernova. When a massive star explodes at the end of its life, the explosion dispenses different elements-helium, carbon, oxygen, iron, nickel-across the universe, scattering starduest. That stardust now makes up the planets, including ours.”

“Jacques wants a pancake shaped like Mozart's Symphony No. 40! In G minor!”

“Yimello,' said Bernard finally, breaking the silence.'Gesundheit?' I asked.'It's a name for one of the colors that's invisible to us. Yimello," said Bernard. "There could also be glowl and novaly and replitz."'Yes.' I nodded, stunned the kid could actually string together so many words at once. 'And, uh, don't forget the beautiful grynn, the luminous dulloff, or the subtle winooze.'Bernard's face lit up. He stood and started pacing the room, speaking quickly. 'Or salty, and insomnia, and carefree, and talkative, and lonely, and burnt, and punctual.''Some of my favorite colors,' I agreed, nodding. 'We could paint this room whisper. Or zigzag. Or maybe a nice shade of ignored and invisible.”

“He saw the kind of beauty yellow flowers have growing over a carpet of dead leaves. The beauty of cracks forming a mosaic in a dry riverbed, of emerald-green algae at the base of a seawall, of a broken shard from a blue bottle. The beauty of a window smudged with tiny prints. The beauty of wild weeds.”

“It's like a nesting doll of imagination! It's like a painting of a painting! It's like the wind catching a chill from the wind, or a wave taking a dip in the ocean. It's like reading a novel that merely describes another novel. It's like music tapping its foot to a tune and saying 'Oh! I love this song!”

“Sometimes imaginary troubles are harder to bear than actual ones.”

“Cloud root beer floats and moon grilled cheeses. But their favorite food is stardust.”

“The missions were always changing- sometimes collecting jars of rain, paper bags of hiccups, adopting lost moonbeams and folding them into cake batter. Or perhaps investigating glittering slug trails left in the moonlight, finding the owners of abandoned buttons, or playing the sousaphone for caterpillars still in their cocoons.”

“The fort.Where the pair stored their painted scenes and books of made-up languages, their two-man band, and the tiny matchbox bed plus accessories that they made in case, someday, their experiments in the world of shrinking finally panned out.”

“things like how to tell the age of a tree, the dances of the moon and tides, and the names of the clouds-like cumulonimbus and nimbosttratus-that sounded lie magic spells on his tongue.”