#the document for ITFOATIY is literally open berry what are you doing

[tideswept]

Oh, oh! Made up title: The Midsummer Incident

This could go either very bad or very harmless in my mind lmao and I haven't decided which instinct would win out so I took my time but--I think I finally have a definitive answer.

And it's... a short story? (wait, wait, stop throwing rotten fruit, it's wasteful! your plants want it!)

"Why do houses bleed?" Morkie—whose name on her birth certificate is Helen Camilla Lynch, but who has a particular set of ideas about whether real names are meant to be used or hidden because she's obsessed with faeries—asks.

I continue buttering the bread. "What do you mean?"

My tone is only curious. No matter their advanced vocabulary, five-year-olds are five-year-olds. Combine that with a fertile imagination, and I'm used to just about anything coming out of my child's mouth. Last week, it had been the deeply philosophical question of whether Santa pays his elves.

(I told her I wasn't sure, and that we could write to him at the end of the year to inquire about his business practices to make sure everything was on the up and up.)

Her attention is on the toast, eagle-eyed that I might screw up the butter-to-bread ratio, which would then throw off the marmalade ratio. "Mr. Barbie's house bled last night."

My head cocks to the side to glance out the kitchen window at the squat house across the street from us. Replicas of Italian statues dot his yard, including an exquisite copy of David that the real estate agent had tried to block with her car when she'd been giving us a house tour, not realizing that my daughter had seen more artistic nudes than most art critics by this point.

Mr. Barbie—Mr. Barberio, but again, due to fairy law, real names were something to be protected—had not been the most pleasant neighbor when we'd moved in late in the spring, but he'd warmed up to us after he discovered I was an artist. Digital, but I had my fondness for charcoal and paper, which had convinced him I wasn't a complete barbarian out to stomp on all things beautiful and true.

He was a spry old man, cagey about his age, with a shock of snow-white hair maintained with the precision of a mathematician's formula, slicked back as if to show off what a full head of it he had.

My husband, who's had a widow's peak since he was Morkie's age, had ruefully rubbed his thinning hair and said, "If you leave me for him, I'll know why."

"Mmn." With a flourish of my wrist to indicate a job well done, I slide the buttered toast onto Morkie's plate. "I can't say saw it happening. What did it look like?"

Morkie takes a bite of her toast and bluntly says, "Like blood."

Alright. Point to the smartass. I pull the closest sketchbook to me—I kept at least one in every room, not out of pragmatism but because I lose them and encounter them again like old friends—and start roughing out the shape of Mr. Barberio's house. "Where? And—hey, no butter fingers."

Morkie looks at her butter-slick hand as if it's betrayed her and pulls it back to hover an inch over the sketch. "Here, and here," she explains, pointing at the two upper windows that face the road.

I dutifully shade in those windows. "Like this?"

"Like crying, mommy." Morkie chomps on her toast, sounding exasperated that I'm not picking up what she's laying down. God, I'm going to miss her when she starts kindergarten in a month. Sassy little beast.

"That's a bit sad, isn't it?" I prod gently, pencil unmoving. The sketch remains as it is, the two windows dark. "Did it make you feel sad?"

Morkie nods. She's finished with the bread and is now dragging her sippy cup to her mouth. She can drink just fine out of a glass; she just likes to vary it up with a classic every once in a while.

"When did you see it?"

"When I was sleeping." Morkie sees no issue with this.

Ah. "Like in a dream?"

"Nope," she says, popping the "p" definitively.

I'm weighing whether to say anything at all because not everything needs an explanation when the sirens, muffled by the closed windows, register.

We live in a quiet neighborhood, deep in a maze of residential streets that simply end rather than looping back into the arteries of the city. So any emergency services hauling ass with all lights on aren't simply passing through; this is their destination.

We watch silently as the ambulance stops in front of Mr. Barberio's house.

📚 [send me a made-up fic title and i’ll tell you what i would write to go with it;]

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