The Collectors by M.T. Anderson EPUB & PDF

The Collectors by M.T. Anderson EPUB & PDF – eBook Details Online

• Status: Available for Free Download
• Author: M.T. Anderson
• Language: English
• Genre: Teen & Young Adult Short Stories
• Format: PDF / EPUB
• Size: 9.5 MB
• Price: Free

Play House
by Anna-Marie McLemore
The first thing most people knew about Miranda Asturias was that Miranda
Asturias had a beautiful mother. Miranda’s mother had hair as black as her
eyelashes. Her lip line was sharp and lent itself well to quick swipes of
lipstick, so that the red looked painted as precisely as if she’d used a brush.
Her skin was a brown as warm as August evenings in their neighborhood,
the air between streetlights just damp enough to be filmy.

If Miranda’s mother noticed the way men looked at her, she did not let
on. Miranda’s mother only noticed Miranda’s father. Every morning in the
kitchen, the two of them gazed at each other as though taking home the
prize after a flawless draw of cards. So when Miranda’s father, after a year
out of work, got a job that would take him away for most of the summer,
they looked as though something had been torn out of them, each of them
cored like apples.

“You’ll look after your mother, won’t you?” Miranda’s father asked her.
Miranda stood in the driveway and nodded. Then she heard herself say,
“Wait,” and ran into the house.
She came back with one of her glass bluebirds. It was small enough to
disappear into her father’s hand.

“For good luck,” she said, though she’d just bought the bluebird at an
estate sale the week before, and had no way of knowing.
As Miranda and her mother washed the dishes that night, there was
something odd about the light outside, something knocked out of place. The
evening was greener, and grayer, the kind that warned of tornados. But
there were no sirens. Only the prickling sense of eyes watching the
windows.

“Someone’s out there,” Miranda said.
Her mother laughed. “No, there’s not.”
But as the night deepened, the prickling grew stronger. Miranda could
almost hear the eyes watching, gazes tapping on the glass like thrown
pebbles.

“No, there’s someone out there,” Miranda said.
“Oh, querida.” Her mother dried the last dish, set it on the stack in the
cupboard. She lined up the scalloped edge perfectly with the one
underneath. “Stop. You’ll give yourself bad dreams.”
Miranda’s mother did not seem to realize she was a famous beauty. She
did not seem to notice how men looked at her. And this was unfortunate.
Because if she had, she might have believed Miranda. They both might
have felt in the air what was coming next.

• • • • • • • • • • • • •

At first, it was a couple of neighbors, men Miranda had seen greeting her
father as he pruned the azaleas. One sat in a chair at the kitchen table.
Another took up residence on the north end of the sofa. A third sat in the
frayed armchair he must have assumed was her father’s favorite. The men
came quickly, that night and the next morning, as though they’d been
waiting in the shadows of the trees for her father’s car to vanish down the
road.

“You two girls need a man in the house,” each proclaimed. Each tried
to elbow the others out of the way.

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