Iris Calloway's Arc

Chapter 1 of 1

Iris Calloway had not seen her twin sister in seven years, and the last real clue was already going soft at the edges. She smoothed the postcard flat on the kitchen table. The stamp was from Froghollow's own post office, mailed six months after her sister vanished from this same house. No return address. No name. Just three words in her sister's slanted hand: still looking too. Iris had one eye brown and one eye green, and so had her sister, and that was the only reason she trusted the card was real. She had spent the last three weeks knocking on doors along the marsh road, asking neighbors if anyone remembered a girl with mismatched eyes passing through. Nobody did. The trail she had built her life around was cooling by the hour, and she was running out of names to ask. She was about to fold the card away when a butterfly landed on it. Blue wings, bright as wet paint, wider than her palm. Iris held still. She knew every moth and beetle in the hollow, and this was not one of them. The butterfly walked once across the postcard, lifted, and drifted out the open window. Iris grabbed her coat and followed. It flew slow, like it wanted her to keep up. It crossed the yard, the fence, the ditch, and stopped at a shed she had not opened since her sister left. The butterfly settled on the padlock. Iris broke the lock with a rock. Inside, on a shelf above a bicycle, sat a shoebox with her own name printed on the lid in her sister's handwriting. She lifted it down. It was heavier than she expected. When she opened it, she saw a stack of letters, all addressed but never mailed, and a bus ticket dated for tomorrow morning, from a town two hundred miles north. The trail was not cold. Someone had been keeping it warm for her.