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it to go. Cars ripped through the streets; headlights flared in the windows, and something nebulous and half formed slowly made its way across the night. It might be an owl, she thought. A wolf, an alligator, or a fox. Or it might be another daddy in another van, with a lot of different, un-Daddy-like notions about what to eat and what to wear. Perhaps there wasn’t room for all these daddies banging around out there, looking for places they hadn’t been, or children they had never known. In some ways, maybe daddies were like water. Always on their way to somewhere else, forming shapes and losing them, dripping like clocks in secret caverns that you couldn’t see. If they stayed in the same place too long, or assumed the same shape, they’d be found by the forces that looked for them. They’d be devoured and transformed into someone different than who they were supposed to be. “Little girl? Hello? Are you safe in there? Will you let me in? I heard your daddy drive off and thought you might be frightened. Do you want to come stay with Mrs Anderson until your daddy gets back? Are your electricals working properly? How about the plumbing and running water? Have you people even got a phone? How can people live in a house like that without a telephone? I’m telling you, little girl, I don’t understand men whatsoever. They don’t have any idea how to raise a little girl at all.” Then, like celestial punctuation, the vast inarticulate storm struck the roof with a huge, tree-muffled fist, causing the curtains to billow and the floors to crack. Even the aluminum sheets on the windows chimed faintly, and something fugitively hissed. A water heater or a pipe. “Little girl! I’m letting myself in with my key! Is there water on the floor? The last time it rained this hard there was water all over the floor! I’m not trying to be nosy, little girl! I just got to make sure those new floors of mine aren’t covered with water!”