More

    The child was lost, but didn't know it, not yet. She had been digging in the garden, "the wannabe garden" her mother called the scraggly strip of dirt along the fence, the"garden possibility," her father said.

    The child simply called it the garden and planted things there. Seeds from oranges and plums...she really wanted a plum to grow there...and other smallish things that she loved: her broken fingernail that bore a strip of red polish, a marble bluer than the sky, a picture of a baby from the newspaper, and rocks.

    There were so many pretty rocks, free for the taking. At first she lined them up along the fence, but the more she dug the tiny graves for her seeds, the rocks began to disappear in the holes she made in the garden, and that felt right to her.

    But she needed more. She had heard her mother say it, in the high voice she used on the phone, "We need more."

    More in her mother's voice sounded like a new word, an important, desperate, desirable word, something essential, so the child opened the gate to look for more.

    Not on her block. She knew where everything was on her block, but, perhaps, the next block or the next or the next would have more. So she kept walking, and picked up "more" when she saw it--a scrap of yellow cloth, a broken pencil, a glove. She almost walked past the glove because her mother had two hands, and would need two gloves, but then she thought, logically, maybe an extra glove was exactly right, so she picked it up too, slid her other finds, her more, in the palm of the glove and kept walking.

    Maybe now her mother would be happy.