A loaf of cat
A doll condo
A shelf on an elf
A slice of Pi
A wheelbarrow for a fairy garden
A solid-black checkerboard
The bang from a drum
The wind under a kite
A shadow’s shadow
An origami salami
A chicken-fried Kentuckian
A ray of darkness
She wanted to scream but didn’t. Jack’s riddles were always obvious once you knew the answer. Hindsight was twenty-twenty. He did say that to them, right? So that had to mean something, didn’t it?
She pulled a pen from her coat pocket, counted with her finger, and read out every twentieth letter.M…A…She counted them all several times, including the numbers and then excluding the numbers. Nothing.
What else had Jack said?
Life can only be understood backwards, but it must be lived forwards.A quote by Kierkegaard, the philosopher.
Understood backward?
All right, she tried reading the clues backward.
A crying wolfbecameflow gniyrc A.
That wasn’t it either.
Jack had also said that all writers knew that you couldn’t understand the beginning until you’ve read the end.
So she read the clues backward to front.
Darkness of ray a Kentuckian…
That wasn’t it.
She was about to give up when she decided to look at the last letter of each phrase. With her pen, she circled all the final letters, and instantly, she knew she was onto something.
A crying wolf—F
An assortment of octopi—I
A humble actor—R
A jar of nine-legged spiders—S
A fish with a secret—T
