She needed a safe place, so she shapeshifted into a mouse. She crawled beneath the blankets, chewed through the mattress, found a hole under the bed and slipped beneath the floorboards. There she fell fast asleep in the space between reality and imagination, her parents’ fighting muted, distant, and small.

A one-time teen mother and high school dropout, Larina Warnock holds a doctorate from Creighton University and teaches high school in rural Oregon where she lives with her husband, foster children, and a small zoo.