The last time I saw you was the first day the anchovies fell from the sky. It was about a week ago, I think. The air felt sweaty and the sky hadn’t yet decided whether it wanted to rain.

You and I were walking down the boardwalk. You had a new dodo bird named Alvaro and you wore him across your body like a purse. He flapped against your hip when you walked.

“Ever since we got to Cuckooland,” you said as the first anchovy splatted against your outstretched, curious fingers, “I just feel so . . . ”

You were talking about the sky and the ocean and the boardwalk and the crepe paper trees and the dodo bird slung across your back, but I was looking at your lips.

At eight the next day, when the cuckoo clock in my Nice Clothes drawer chirped twelve, I found Alvaro pecking through your makeup bag. Your makeup was all there. No—after rooting through it a second time, I found your red lipstick was gone.

Red lipstick, golf cart, plastic pineapple. All gone. Your footprints had puffed out from the memory foam of our driveway by the time I thought to look. I asked the townspeople where you had gone; a woman in the wrong coat said you’d shot to the moon, and a man with a moustache that zigged and zagged told me he’d seen you under the canary’s wing.

I took Alvaro out for tequila that night. He told me, in his craggy Russian accent, that I would never understand and left me with his bill.

I slept on the couch that night—and every night since—and I’ve been searching for you in the day. You’re skittering down my windowpane with the raindrops, you’re floating right below the glass surface of the river, you’re playing connect-the-dots on a cheetah’s back.

Alvaro came around two weeks after you left to remind me to pay the gravity bill. That was always your job. You were the one to notice when our toes couldn’t stretch to the ground and our books were gliding along above our heads. I liked it that way, when we had to swim through dressers and blankets and silverware to reach the refrigerator, but you did not. You said I didn’t give the ground enough credit. I forgave you for that.

I forgave you for all of it, and you still disappeared. Alvaro said you went somewhere where the sky rains water, not small fish, and the trees shed leaves and you never have to pay for gravity. If it’s true, I feel sorry for you. You’ll never let another palm tree chase you down the boardwalk, you’ll never tug your way out of another taffy puddle, you’ll never pay another crane to take you to the top of a rainbow. You’ll miss it all someday, and then you’ll come back to me, and we’ll walk down the boardwalk with Alvaro between us the way we did before the anchovies fell from the sky.