so we could only see a pair of bare feet resting on the ladder rung, legs tucked safely inside pant legs, T-shirt with a Ghostbusters logo emblazoned across the chest, and a string of chunky beads around her neck like planets dancing around the sun. When her hands reappeared, they were, for untold reasons, clutching slivers of the Yellow Pages. Unprompted, she began rattling off the names and numbers of florists in town: a Rose and a Violet and a Lily, a Daisy and a Jasmine, her head still missing from plain view. The list seemed endless. She continued until the other guests got restless and bored and slowly wandered off with all our toilet paper.

Later, when we were alone, she told me what she had truly found up there: a miniature spaceship, collecting dust in our very own attic. She didn’t know if it was only a toy or what. I climbed up the ladder to share a glimpse. Together, we fiddled with unlabeled dials, depressed buttons that emitted a strange sort of ethereal music, but the foreign object never moved, never flew. What materials made up its parts? I wondered. Stainless steel, she said with certainty, but I wasn’t as sure. The shiny silver surface grew pink under the heat of my touch as if embarrassed by my forwardness. Meanwhile, I noticed (with alarm) the minute hand of my watch had begun running in the other direction, but she told me, firmly, not to worry about that:

Our real problems remained in the attic.