Telephone narrative, pt. III

I grilled her hard today. She was home sick, my daugher. I told her that I needed her to tell me a story on the phone, so I could complete my telephone narratives. She is usually like an anthology, but sick, at her mom's house it went like this:

How was the sleep-over on Friday? Good.
What did you guys eat? Taquitos.
What was in the taquitos? Chicken.
You really don't have a good story in mind right now, do you? No.

So, I am taking another route. Here is a story that we built together, all four of us at various times, but, in the beginning, it was mostly me and her. I will write it with her as a children's novel one day, but maybe we will serial it, Dickens-style, on here first.

Three girls are new to an elementary school, and because they feel like social outcasts, they take to sitting next to each other at the sandbox during recess every day while everyone else plays. Sometimes they talk; sometimes not. Every day they sit in the same place. Eventually they notice that their feet have made nearly permanent indentions in the sand, which is fine. Normal. Boring. Until one girl experiments with wearing two different shoes one day to "trick" the sand, but as the trio walks up to the box, the shoe outlines in the sand correspond to the mismatched shoes and her own place on the bench. Somehow, the sand knows something. They experiment further, trying to switch their order right before they approach their sitting place, but the sand is always ready for them. This is weird, but does not compare to the inexplicability of the designs that begin to show up around one pair of shoes at a time: an eyeball, a question mark, a dotted line. The girls learn that not only do the designs in the sandbox foretell their choices, but they can sometime predict the onset of certain temporary abilities that cannot be explained. Or mentioned to adults.

See there, my beautiful daughter. You did have a story in you today. We just had to get it from the archive.