Pluto lost her truck in a back alley today.

Screaming, she dropped to the slush and turned her chin up to her mother, her namesake, in the sky:

“How do we lose the largest things we own?” she whispered, her voice caught in the upward curve of her throat. “Tell me--where can they possibly go? You would know; you are the biggest thing we’ve ever lost.”

To which, of course, her mother did not respond, because she had been forgotten a long time ago behind the shower curtain of the sky. (Funny, how fabric can cover so much and all of it at the same time).

Groping at her kneecaps, Pluto found herself scratching with her city’s memories—Is that where the things had been lost? In the old looms that cackled quietly? In the huge warehouses in the middle of nowhere where no? In the place--what--words gone?

In the old file cabinets of obituaries submitted to the New York Times that were never published because...?

This is the story of Pluto, the young trucker who died today, and who is now behind the threadbare bars of the sky.