*
She carried her re-stitched red and blue backpack over to a mass of stony crags and crabgrass. Her ruffled white dress fit her like a kite, a windsock. It caught the wind like laundry usually does when put out on the line to dry. Like her backpack, her dress also carried subtle signs of wear and repair. In fact, if the dress had been found suspended from a wire hanger (for she was in many ways a wooden hanger herself) and was folded in half, one might mistake the dress for a runner, or table linen of some sort. Faded coffee crescents and tea moon halos freckled a small section of the dress' side. On the dress' back a cluster of four copper stars half-aligned themselves to form a marker, a constellation staining where once had been stuck a rusty safety pin to gather the excess fabric.
In the sand she pivoted and crouched like a paper crane beside the backpack. After unbuttoning and unzippering the sack, she reached inside and withdrew two cameras: one silver chrome and one which was mysteriously concealed beneath a stiff, but mouse-eaten leather case. Even with the two cameras removed from the bag, the sack's puckered contour suggested that there was still another camera or two hidden behind the familiarly firm folds.
She wore the camel-case camera like a nymph might carry a quiver, and with one hand she cradled the lightly-frosted, silver camera just above her hip. With her other hand she locked her fingers in the crags' keyholes and descended the dune with as much poise as a Russian countess stepping down a winding Winter Palace staircase.
THE BOY
*
He was less like a honeybee and more like a dart when he held his camera. By the time she had chosen her cameras, he had already positioned himself, half-kneeling behind a large stone. The skin around his left temple gathered... like rain running from eaves and into the gutter
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