From The Price of Extension
by Esi Noire
There was a drawer no one used. Nomi claimed it.
She lined it with cloth. Added safety pins, batteries, a fan, and a magnet shaped like a rooster.
“Who told you to clean that out?”
“No one.”
“And yet you did.”
“I’m not programmed to wait for crisis.”
When a storm came, the boy barely made it in.
Nomi handed him a journal. “It’s a map with no lines yet.”
She gave the smallest child the rooster magnet. “Want to hold something brave?”
Later, she slipped in a label:
Emergencies, Small and Otherwise.
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