Maple Jack stood at the quiet corner and counted the days until Canada Day. He wanted every story of kindness inside him ready to share. His red bark trembled. Soon the children would come, and he would finally let his sparks fly. The striped red and white fence around him looked cheerful, but no small boots stood beside it. A stack of bright storybooks sat tucked against a post, left behind one cold winter long ago. Their covers were faded now. No one had come to read them in seasons. Inside Maple Jack, the pressure grew. Red sparks pushed against his branches like a swirling creature trying to escape. One leaf-shaped spark burst from a twig and spun in the air. It had nowhere to land. No ears were waiting. No eyes were watching. The spark hovered, then sank to the ground and dimmed. Maple Jack felt the truth settle hard. Canada Day was coming, the corner was ready, but the children were not here. He would have to find a way to call them back.

Maple Jack stood at the empty corner and tried his voice. He called the way he used to, low and warm, the kind of sound meant to reach a child's ear from across a yard. His call rolled down the sidewalk and kept rolling. No window opened. No door swung wide. The sound thinned into a pale ribbon of air that curled past the candy cane fence and frayed apart between the houses. He watched it go and knew it had found no one. He needed to know where the children had gone. Without that, every word he sent out would unravel the same way. He looked down at the dirt along the curb and saw faint shapes pressed into the dried mud. Small boot prints. A scuffed heel. A toe turned toward the next street, then another set turned the other way. The tracks had once led straight to his trunk. Now they pointed outward, scattered, like spokes leaving a wheel. He could follow them, but they split too many ways. He needed someone who had watched the children go. At the far end of the block stood a woman in an orange vest with a red stop sign resting against her shoulder. Dorothy Sullivan had worked this crossing longer than most of the trees on the street had been tall. Maple Jack rustled his branches until she turned. She walked over without hurry and stopped a careful distance from his roots. "You're the maple," she said. "They used to sit here." "I need to find them," Maple Jack said. "Where did the children go?" Dorothy looked down the street, then back at him. "Most moved. Some grew up. The little ones go to the day care now. Yellow house, blue trim, two blocks south. Their parents drop them at the door. They don't walk this way anymore." She tapped the base of her sign against the pavement. "Nobody told them about you. That's the part you're asking." Maple Jack felt a spark shift inside his trunk, then settle. "Yes." "Then go where they are," Dorothy said. "They won't come here on their own." She lifted her sign and walked back to her crossing. He could not move his roots, but his voice could travel further than this corner if he aimed it right. Two blocks south stood a small bright building with flower boxes in every window and a painted sign above the door. He could picture the porch now, the low fence, the cluster of small coats hung in a row. The children were not gone. They were only somewhere else. The empty street was no longer a wall. It was a direction. Maple Jack drew in a long breath through every leaf and turned his attention south.

Maple Jack aimed his voice south and called again. The sound left him strong, then thinned at the end of the first block. By the second block it was a whisper. He could see the yellow house with the blue trim, the painted sign above the door, the row of small coats behind the front window. He could not reach it. Two blocks was too far. His bark tightened. The children were that close, and his voice still died in the air between. He tried a different shape. He pulled the call up from his deepest root and pushed it out through every leaf at once. The street carried it half a block and dropped it on the sidewalk. A pale wisp of breath curled up from the spot where the sound fell, gathered itself into a thin drifting figure with a small folded note pressed to its chest, and waited. It could carry a message, but only if a message reached it. His voice was not getting that far. Maple Jack stopped pushing. He listened instead. Wind moved along the gutters. A weathervane creaked somewhere behind him. He understood then that he had been trying to throw his voice like a stone. A story was not a stone. A story was a small living thing that wanted to go. He had been holding the sparks back for so long he had forgotten they had their own legs. He thought of the girl in Yellowknife and the mitten, the story worn smooth inside him, and he loosened his grip on it by a single notch. One red spark broke loose from his trunk and floated out into the street. It was the size of a sugar maple leaf and bright as a coal. It carried a small dark book clutched against its body, and it moved on its own, low and steady, down the sidewalk. The wisp lifted from the pavement and fell in beside it. Together they crossed the first block. They crossed the second. They stopped at the low fence of the day care, where a blue voice recorder sat fixed to a post beside the gate, its silver microphone turned toward the street. The spark hovered at the grille. The recorder's red light blinked once and held. A tiny speaker on the porch clicked on, and Maple Jack heard his own voice come out of it, two blocks south, telling the first line of the Yellowknife story to no one yet, but inside the fence now, inside the yard, inside the air the children breathed. A small coat moved behind the front window. Then another. Maple Jack did not call again. He had reached them. The next problem was already forming in his trunk: he had sent one spark, and there were hundreds more pressing against the bark, and only one of him to let them go.

Maple Jack loosened his grip a second time. Two more sparks broke from his bark and lifted into the street. Before they could find the sidewalk, a flat prairie wind came down hard from the west. It caught the sparks sideways. One tumbled over a fence and out across an empty lot. The other skidded low along the pavement and burned a thin black streak through the dry grass at the curb before it vanished. Maple Jack felt both stories tear out of him and go nowhere a child would ever hear. He held the rest back. Hundreds pressed against his bark, hot and impatient, but he would not release them into that wind. He had waited seven winters. He could not waste these stories on an empty lot. He looked south toward the yellow house and saw the wind bending the small trees along the sidewalk. The air between him and the day care had become a river running the wrong way. He turned his attention west, where the wind came from. A tall grain elevator stood at the edge of the field, its silo broad and its wooden housing braced on steel legs. It was the only thing for blocks that stood taller than he did. He studied the angle. If a spark left his trunk on the south side, the elevator's shadow would cover the first stretch of sidewalk. The wind would break against the silo and slide around it. The corridor behind it would be still. He tried one spark as a test. A small ember creature pulled itself free of his bark, a book clutched to its chest, its red glow flickering. Maple Jack aimed it low along his south side, into the lee of the elevator. The wind shoved at it once and missed. The spark wobbled, dipped, and then a thin tunnel of curling air formed in the calm pocket behind the silo, hollow as a sleeve. The spark slid inside it. The tunnel held the ember steady and pointed it down the block. It crossed the first sidewalk square. It crossed the second. It kept going, low and straight, toward the blue trim and the row of small coats. Maple Jack marked the path in his mind. He would send them this way, one at a time, behind the elevator's shoulder, through the still corridor the wind itself had built. He loosened his grip another notch and felt three more sparks rise to the bark, ready. But the wind was already shifting. The weathervane behind him creaked a quarter turn. The corridor that worked now might not work in an hour. He had found his route, and he had to use it before the prairie took it back.