Poppy lived in a garden. She also lived in a carnival. Really they were one in the same. The rides were made from vegetables and operated by field mice half the size of humans. A parakeet walked tightrope with china cups balanced on her head. Frogs led unicycle parades around the grounds, tooting trumpets and cheers. Butterflies wrote mathematical equations in the sky, providing shade instead of clouds. There were never clouds here.

It was all indefinably, unequivocally strange and wonderful, and the strangest part about it was Poppy.

She was human.

All the parakeets and the frogs and the butterflies, and even the wise green trees who let pups and cubs and birdlings play in their limbs, had never seen the likes of her before. She lived in a brightly painted house they built for her among the tall grasses, all pink and yellow and blue as tenderly loved robin's eggs. Every day she cooked for them, soup in a gigantic pot that was its own dinner bell, and every day they left her a collection of thank yous: shining stones, speckled feathers, braided flowers, and paper mobiles that spun in the breeze.

Poppy loved her magical garden carnival with all her heart. It was all she knew to love, and all she loved to know. She rode her sunny yellow bike around the rides, waving to the furry little patrons, minks, and voles, and rabbits with clever humor and honey laughs. In the evenings, when the sun was lazy and low, she went to the pier out on the pond and spit watermelon seeds with the old crows. They ruffled their graying feathers at everything, but winked at her and saved her trinkets from their beloved collections. Bits of fine silver chain, earrings caught in the underbrush, pearls lost from some long ago necklace.

Sometimes, at night, Poppy held these treasures up to her candles and wondered. Who would wear such things? The rabbits never did. The foxes never did. Even the snooty skunks in their perfect stripes never did. Surely, she thought, fixing the pearls to a clip she'd made for her wild golden hair, it was someone like her who had lost them. Who might want them back.

But where had they gone?

Poppy knew what she was and knew what she wasn't. She wasn't a wondrous creature like those that belonged to the carnival. She was a different sort of wondrous. A sort that was the only one. It was lonely sometimes. It was dreamy sometimes. Like she was a collective figment of all the carnival participants' imaginations.

In her heart, though, she knew she was real. And in her heart, guilty under her covers at night, she wanted to find another carnival, with people like her. It felt like disloyalty because she loved it here. But she was a marvel, a child, a pet.

Poppy wanted more. She didn't want to just make up in her head what someone wearing a pearl necklace would look like. She wanted to find them, to meet them, to know if they'd been looking for her, to know why she'd been lost, to know why even the most whimsical, charming place in the world couldn't make her happy in the loneliest corners of her heart.