Amelia Becker was seven the first time her body remembered dying, and the memory was four inches too tall for her.

Mrs. Kaminski gave the assignment twice, because second graders needed it twice. “Draw a place you remember,” she said. “Your house, your backyard, your grandmother’s kitchen. Any place that is real to you.”

Amelia sat at the third table from the door and flattened her paper with both hands where it wanted to curl. She liked assignments with rules, and this one had a rule, a real place, so she had already chosen the kitchen at home: the window over the sink, the blue tin where Margaret kept the pencils, the four squares of light on the floor in the morning.

She picked up the brown.

Her hand went somewhere else.

The first line came down long and straight and her hand did not stop at the end of it. A second line crossed it near the top. Then a third, slanted, and a fourth to meet it, and she understood she was making a roof. She could feel the crayon between her fingers and the drag of the wax against the paper, and she was not the one choosing where it went.

Verticals. Crossbars. Iron between the glass.

She reached for green without looking in the box and her fingers found it on the first try. Rows of green went along the benches, both walls, and there was a gap in the left row where a pot had been lifted out and not put back, so she drew the gap.

Blue next. One line high on the wall with little marks under it where the water came through. She did not decide how high. Her hand set it there because that was where it was.

Then the smell came. It came in underneath the pencil shavings and the floor wax and did not belong to either of them. Dirt. Wet dirt, and warm, the smell of a hand pushed down into a pot that had just been watered.

The brown crayon rolled out of her fingers, crossed the paper, and stopped against the ruler at the edge of the table.

She reached for it.

Her hand landed past it. Her fingers closed on the tabletop on the far side of the ruler, on nothing, and she looked at her own hand sitting out there in the wrong place and could not work out how it had gotten there. She counted, because counting was something to do. Four of the little marks on the ruler between her fingers and the crayon.

Her arm was too long. That was the shape of the wrongness and she had no other words for it. Her shoulder had not moved. Somewhere between her elbow and the tabletop, four marks of her had been added on that did not belong to her, and she could feel the whole length of it, the borrowed inches sitting inside her own skin like a sleeve pushed down over her hand.

The pressure arrived at the front of her throat.

It was thin and hard and it sat higher than her throat went. Her hand flew up to pull it off and landed on the bone of her jaw, and she dragged her fingers down looking for it, past her chin, down onto her neck, and it stayed above her hand the whole time.

Her nails went into the skin under her jaw and left lines there and found nothing to take hold of, because the thin hard thing lay across a part of her that was not there.