The dog ran off. You search for lost dogs, that’s what people do. Escaped dogs. You call them. You fan out among the trees. Whose idea was it to bring the fetid thing anyway…

The littlest sister, of course. All the bad ideas are hers. An ocean of bad ideas, reliable as tides.

She had been the one who found the broken foundations of the old racetrack. And stepped in. She found a series of notches on the trunk of a tree, and missed the meaning.

When the dog crawled out of the earth near the middle of the track, dirt crumbling off his coat, she didn’t see it for what it was. 

Where were her sisters now? She’d lost the thread of their voices in the woods, calling the dog’s name. Sounding like echoes. No birds, either.

Who made those notches? It was too late to wonder now. It had already happened. She sat down on a smooth stone and didn’t bother to test the air. She knew a wall when she imagined one.

The dog shook off dirt and trotted a slow circle around the place where the racing lines had been. He kept his distance.

It dawned on her that dogs don’t just get born from the earth. A tunnel? What if there were only ways in?

“I want my money back,” she shouted, hoping absurdity might solve the problem.

“You haven’t even paid yet,” said the dog. Fine, fine, what other things didn’t work right here, she thought. No exits. The dog speaks. Things come in threes.

A berry bramble across what once was a gate. She figured eating in here was a bad idea. Or maybe it was the answer.

She tried feeding a berry to the dog, and nothing happened. Nothing she could tell, anyway.

It should be getting dark, her body told her, but it wasn’t. Was that the third thing? She needed a plan.

“What the hell do we do?” She asked the dog.

“This,” the dog said, pawing the uneven pile it had burst out of. There was a tunnel after all. Was this the third thing? It seemed like the only thing. She followed the dog down into the dirt. It smelled like the sea.