The writing desk

Under the Sunflowers

by Exander Johns

A year after her little sister dies in a haunted-hayride accident, twelve-year-old Seal still carries her sister's doll everywhere she goes. When an earthquake tears open the earth beneath her family's South Dakota sunflower field, Seal and her neighbor Javin fall into a shadowed world of monsters, stolen memories, and spirits who have forgotten their own names. To find a way home, Seal must cross a land shaped by old wounds, trust the boy she never wanted as a friend, and confront a terrible question: how tightly can you hold on to someone you love before love itself becomes a cage?

"Stop. You'll make it worse." Seal knelt beside him and unwound the crusted cloth. Up close, his stitched skin looked like her mom's sewing, careful in some places and hurried in others. She folded a clean strip the way her mom folded kitchen towels and bound the wound tight.

"You fix me," William said.

"My mom fixes Paintchip when she tears. Somebody sewed you once. Somebody can sew you again."

William was quiet for a long time. "I'm made of Seven men," he finally said. He put one huge hand over the wound. "Sometimes I hear them. They do not agree what I am."

"You don't have to be seven men," Seal said. "You can just be William."

The patchwork man made a sound she had not heard from him before. Low and even, like a tractor idling. She decided it was laughter. "Just William," he said. "Good name. You rest. Just William watches."

— Seal and the patchwork man

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