Among the rows, you notice boot prints and you step inside them with your sandal. You press into the muddy earth, carefully fitting four of your prints into each big boot print.

Above you a dragon circles, silver, shimmers in the heat. No one notices. You place four dragon’s teeth in the soil, cover them like a secret.

After two hours, your father notices the redness on your arms and decides you have had enough for the day, hoists the baskets and your crying self skywards and walks toward the front of the farm to pay up. Time to make strawberry shortcake, he says out loud, but you will not be soothed. All the way home, you wail and wail, not soothed by cool cloths. Salty wet courses down your face and blends with the red fruit in your mouth. You watch out the window as a dragon curls around the sun, just above the crescent of moon. No one else sees.

At night, ten men and women with wide boots walk under a low moon. They come from the tree line, where a truck is parked. They come from all over the world. Moving quietly through rows upon rows, they shine headlights on the earth. Hunched over, baskets and buckets at their wrists. Pulling earthworms from the earth. You will see the signs of summer—the big store where your father buys earthworms and shiny strings of line for fishing. A few cents for a languid day by the water. You will not think of the invisible hands behind the harvest. Long after strawberry season, long after you stop looking for the dragon because it is school season and you are thinking about other things, you will still shudder at the feel of worms wriggling on your fingers. Will feel slightly sick at the feel of a hook catching on flesh.

One of the worm pickers sees something in the sky—a silvery haze above the moon lighting up the fields of berries. It moves like a snake around stars, a flash of teeth and tail. One of the invisible pickers steps into the same boot print you stepped into, pressing a strawberry into the damp earth. An indelible mark of summer.