A lynching in stereoscope.

Jelly

I turn Elizabeth Street. On the sidewalk there's up a penny. Lincoln, great emancipator. I decide to kick him rather than pick him up. There's enough Honest Abes in my pocket. I drain my Pepsi, letting the caffeine hit, while the sugar seeps into my teeth and zigzags up my nose. I shiver. Someone's tossed a soda can into the lilac bushes where the scentless buds are hard as BBs. It must be 90 degrees today, but I'm in an ice pocket. The air's getting colder, and I can feel the chill of these rich houses. I'm on my way to a new job as a live-in housekeeper. What could be easier than helping some senior citizens swallow pills? I can make people like me. Any flavor. Old folks. Tough kids. Everyone in Harris County Jail was always saying, "Jelly, your eyes remind us of a Thai girl's, your skin's a hot gingerbread, you're the kind of girl the basketball players like to date. Jelly, what do you play? Your arms and thighs are tight." I kept to myself, lifting barbells. "Jelly, why are you trying to be so big?" I have to laugh when I think of the question the quivery male voice kept asking me on the phone when I called about the job: "Are you strong?"

That's it. A Spanish-style house with low-pitched clay tile roof and white stucco walls. I breathe in the salt cedars, the bushes pearled with skin petals that seem to sweat. I knock at the back door like the man told me to. "Come in, come in. It's not locked." A young guy in jeans and t-shirt opens the door and waves me into the kitchen. He's blond and well-built.

Ciz

I soap myself with the last of the yellow bar. Today is soap-making day, and I'm known in a few shacktowns for my recipes. Honeysuckle and cinnamon, dogwood and toffee. Humming, I run the cloth over my underarms. Sometimes I wish I could adorn myself in leaves, the dirt and stains of wood, not reach for my mended calico. I don't bother with drawers or stockings. The ninety degrees are crowding me as I push my head through the dress neck, and pull the comb through my wild hair that needs three hands to tie it back. I press the tin mirror close to my face, and hunt for the light in my eyes, like once I searched for my son's father. I was thirteen then. Now I'm twenty-five. Brightness is what the mirror gives back, gold flecks in each brown iris, and a nose that fits nice between eyes and cheeks. My lips are full but not to bursting. "Sweet Ciz," my grandpa used to say, "you weren't there when they passed out the feet. Only the inches." But he was wrong. I stand four feet eight inches tall.

"Alp, rise and shine, my sweet potato pie." I sing to my son still asleep behind the curtain that divides the room. "Fried cornmeal mush."

Beautiful heat, already a green steam in the leaves when I cross under the chestnut. Not a whiff of breeze in my bottle tree. Alp and I hung the branches with root beer jugs and bud vases--each filled with colored water to protect us. It's July, so the cook stove is out in the summer kitchen. The embers glow when I stir them. Suddenly the hairs stiffen on my upper lip. The eyes in the back of my head see the dog on the stoop. A white bloodhound. His tongue hangs sideways from his muzzle, and he's panting. A scream knots my throat. I need a griot woman to tell me what this means. Maybe old Sally Joy. The good medicine would keep an evil-spirited dog away. This one must be a benefactor, come to bless my soap making.

Jelly

It's heat I've never walked into before. I almost swoon. Copper pots hang above the stove where a kettle of applesauce simmers. The sink and counters glow avocado-green. Sun slants in from a dormer hitting my silver platform shoes. The blond squints like they hurt his eyes.

"I'm the new live-in," I say, wishing I had sneakers on. To run if anything goes wrong.

He gives me a long look that takes in the leather fringes that lace up the sides of my jean bellbottoms, my midriff purple top, my dreds tied back in a rubber band.

I don't tell him I picked the clothes out of a pile because they fit; I don't tell him about my arrest, sitting in the Texas Street Greyhound bus depot next to this Mexican woman who had three kids--two boys and a baby girl. She asked if I'd hold the baby while she took her boys to the bathroom. The next thing I knew the cops were arresting me for kidnapping. I did two months in County, before a judge threw the charges out. Two days ago I said goodbye to Houston. I told my mom and baby brother I'd phone from Arkansas. My lucky number is two.

Look what the dog dragged in, he's thinking. I can't believe the old ashes plan on hiring this one. A black Elvis backup singer in her karate jumpsuit. He grins to mask himself.

"Who are the old ashes?" Sometimes I can hear inner speech; that's my gift, my one specialness, to pick up sentences now and then, and the voices people talk to themselves in.

His chin jerks. "Natalie and Nathan, the twins." He picks up the spatula from a spoon tray and stirs the applesauce. "I'm Roland. I come Sundays only."

He's friendlier now that he wonders if I can see inside his mind, and shows me the bland diet menus taped to the cupboards, the sea salts and sugar substitutes, the lower cabinet with a Lazy Susan filled with vitamins and medications.

"Why Sundays only?" I edge my shoulder against the sub-zero refrigerator, feel it hum. I'm high on having gotten a job with no questions asked, no lies having to be told.

"I'm not a slave." He daubs his pinkie into the applesauce, and then licks. "Definitely more cinnamon sugar. That's how the old ashes like it. I'm surprised diabetes isn't one of their many afflictions."

"Bring him in, Roland," a man shouts in a papery voice. I hear slippers making a sandpaper scuff over tile, and then a thumping sound.

"Her, Nathan, it's a her." Roland rolls his eyes. He holds open the salon-style door.

Ciz

"Shoo," I say to the bloodhound. "Shoo." I've never seen such whiteness as this hound with his droopy ears and blue eyes like pieces of the sky were cut out and forced into his head. "What do you want with me?" The grease in the skillet is sputtering, crackling, and popping like it's angry. I run to stir it. When I turn back to the screen the dog is gone, and Alp is rubbing his sleepy face about to set himself down on the step. His irises have tiny flecks of yellow in them. Like caught bits of sun. He's a big boy, almost six feet tall and just going on twelve.

"Boy, bring me some creek water, and then you'll eat." Before I send him off, I ask him about the bloodhound.

He shakes his head, brushes off a fly that mistakes his reddish purple lips for plums. "If the dog comes back, can we keep him?"

I tell him no. "Now go on. Get the bucket." He goes. Sweet natured with dimples, give him a white peach and he's happy for a week. Alp likes to carve soldiers out of soap ends. He gathers blackberries and blueberries and mashed cypress bark to dye uniforms with. Then he scratches battlefields in the dirt with a stick, and puts his Battle of the Somme between the sweet gum trees. I don't dare interfere with Alp when he's making a battle. I watch him disappear into the boxwoods and acacia.

Old Sally Joy comes by borrow some lard. From her dogtrot cabin someone is playing a banjo and singing. Her daughter has a new fine brown man. Bluejays try to stick in their own verses. I get an old newspaper and wrap her up a cone of lard. It's high noon before I get time to fry up some kale and bacon. Alp smells food and comes running to me.

"The soap needs rainwater. Tend to it," I say straight into his face. He takes after me. The main reason my soap's so fine is that I boil my lye in rainwater, and then add it to the creek water along with sassafras oil, and left over bones.

"Ma, it's too hot to carry water."

"And stir the water in slow, Alp."

"Ma, if lightning struck a tree I was under, would it electrocute me?"

"Not if you weren't standing up."

"Ma, if I was swimming and a water moccasin bit me, would I get sick?"

"Alp, you're going to wish I was a snake if you don't get that water."

It usually takes three times of telling Alp to do something before he does it. But for some reason it tires me today more than usual. The heat is flat-out, and the handle of the fry pan seems heavy in my hand. That feathery shade near the creek starts to call Ciz Ciz and almost puts me to sleep.

Jelly

The old man thumps his cane. His hair is messed like he slept in it. He's tall with a handsome gray face, and dressed in a beige terrycloth robe with brown slippers. He ushers me down a hall. Rounded doors, and grillwork windows. Burgundy throw rugs.

We stop next to earth-colored pottery jugs set in a cluster "You'll be preparing our meals, bathrooming us, doing laundry, lifting if needed. And I am Nathan. You're answerable to mainly me." The old man's eyes squint like he is trying to squeeze a tear from them. "You'll get room and board, and four hundred dollars a week. You look muscular enough to lift us. We weigh hardly anything at all. We're old house cats and our bones stick out like grasshoppers."

I listen to the oars of the ceiling fan stirring the air. He motions me deeper in past the end tables that burgundy pillows sit on. The living room is almost bare except for a wide screen TV, two hospital beds, and an oxygen tank. A woman lies propped on pillows, absorbed in a talk show.

"We'll have a few words with Natalie. It's just the two of us. We've tried the home health aides sent by the state. Abominations!" His slipper hooks the edge of the burgundy rug, and he catches his balance by grabbing my arm. "You're a sturdy well-built girl, exceptionally strapping." He trips again. "Hell cat, I'll cane you flat," he says, striking the rug with his cane. "Natalie, this is ..." he falters.

"Cozetta Clark. But I go by Jelly," I tell him, thinking of my mother throwing up her hands when she found me yet again hiding in the curtain with a jar of Welch's grape jelly, almost empty.

He bows. "Cozetta, how lovely. Yet Jelly has its beauty too. Unlike my twin."

Ciz

Midafternoon. The banjo goes quiet, making more room for the heat. The lye-hot sun smolders above the white dogwoods, the blooms curl and suck in their scent. It's that trembling dwarf nectarine time when the heat ripens inside you. I can hardly see for the sweat in my eyes. I force the ladle through the bubbling soap. It feels like a journey. The summer kitchen screen snaps, meaning Alp's going for more cornbread. And then I hear a choking sound--an animal trying to draw breath, like gasping through soggy cheesecloth. I raise the ladle. It's that bloodhound again. The albino. He's barely crawling, dragging himself by his front paws. Did you get into my caustic soda? If you did, you're a goner. He's whining, his mouth foams red-flecked spittle. If he ate caustic, his throat will swell, and his esophagus will burn inside him. I run to the rainwater barrel and fill the dipper. Here, hound, let me clean your mouth. He scratches his nose in the dirt like he is tracking a squirrel; his neck arches in a fantastic snap. I freeze. Suddenly I am more frightened of the dog's death than he, worried over the heart beating so fast I can watch it through the pale belly and rib cage, the heart beating like a drum. The in and out frantic panting stops. Head now clumsy crashes to the ground.

"Alp!" He's sure to have his finger in the molasses can. "Alp, come here."

Jelly

Nathan laughs, "My dear twin."

Two plastic tubes curl into her nose, and a hose connects her to the oxygen. Natalie's eyes are more violet than blue, and she must have been blonde in her day, but now the only light hairs left are the ones that grow in the wrinkles around her mouth. I think of de-silking sweet corn. She scowls at the huge TV at the foot of her bed where a car growls, turning turns into a jaguar.

"My sister has emphysema. Sixty cigarettes a day, a waterway of smoke, for forty years creates what you see." He sits on his bed, sliding off his bedroom slippers. "Could you pick my legs up and swing them in?" I think of coffee stirrers when I lift his legs. "Ah, such nice hands." He lies back with a groan. "We'll enjoy the use of them. I'm quite satisfied. Roland will acquaint you with the house. Choose either of the master bedrooms to sleep in."

"I can't take the light," Natalie complains. "Would you close the drapes?"

Arabesques of grillwork. I pity the burglar who chooses this window.

"Oh, Jelly," Nathan calls. "After you settle in, would you look for something for us? It will be in my old closet. At the back I have a bookcase, and on the middle shelf, a box with a tiger on its lid. Since you're such a muscular girl, I have no hesitation in asking you to carry it down."

Ciz

Where is a dog in his mind when he dies? With his prey, digging their bones up from shallow graves, the mice and coon whispering his name. Should I bury him in the garden where the dirt is musky and soft, cover him with the curling squash vines? He'll bring bad luck to my sweet corn. I go for a gunnysack. "Alp," I keep calling. I'm panting by the time I get the dog in the burlap. And just then to see fifty townspeople walking in the sun through the black walnuts and buckthorn and crab apples, makes your heart stop, and then pick up again hard. What do they want? They must be going after someone. Maybe Sally Joy, maybe the banjo player, maybe one of the croppers stole something. "What can I do for you?" I call out, thinking don't you come out, boy. I've been calling you and you didn't listen, so now you stay where you are, make yourself small.

I recognize Sheriff Garner. His deputies have regular redbone hounds tugging at leashes. The redbones sniff their way to the gunnysack. "We've found the dog," the square-headed deputy shouts. He nudges the dead hound; its muzzle expels a clot of blood like a well-fleshed blackish strawberry. Things go on in a dog's hell. The deputy is shaking his head. "Know who this here dog belongs to? R. E. Lee Wilson."

My blood ices. Mr. R. E. owns the air I'm breathing.

Sheriff Garner walks toward me, rocking the upper part of his body. He's known to visit shack women. Has a girl by one of them in Judsonia. "This dog was trailing the boy who molested his mistress. A nine-year-old girl. Happened this morning!"

"My boy's been with me all day. The folks around here can tell you."

Alp steps out of the summer kitchen, and three or four town men in suspenders and straw hats hustle him over to where I am. The coals under the soap kettle glow sweet potato-orange. "Listen. Whatever he done, whatever you say he done, I did it. He didn't do anything"

"We're going to make us a trial. This animal took down his pants in front of a nine-year-old girl."

They dunk Alp's hand into the scalding soap. His scream rises to the treetops. First time he ever pees himself since he was a baby.

Names fly. Killers, castrated pigs, dirt, shack dung, coons.

Jelly

I choose Nathan's old room for my own. I plop down in the oak chair, put up my feet, and look around. There's too much of something, but I can't figure what it is until I spot the decorative wooden boxes on the dresser top. A box takes every flat-surfaced space: bee boxes, dragon boxes, a lady box, the hair for ring storage and compartments behind her breasts.

"Jelly," Nathan's watery voice rises up the stairs. "Remember the box I asked for."

It's a struggle to climb to my feet. The closet runs almost the length of the room. I switch on the light. Hanging in a row are three- piece suits in blues and grays, tuxedos with long coat tails, and shoes in racks, so many men's shoes, brick-brown Oxfords, and black wingtips with such lustrous shine they seem on fire. It doesn't look like Nathan walked far in any of them, let alone danced. Smell of cherry tobacco clings to the dry cleaning bags like the inside of a cold pipe stem.

I find the bookcase in the far back, and on top is a flat ebony box with a tiger panel. Next to it is another of those decorative boxes, this one in the shape of a screaming man. His head is hinged and I open it with my fingernail. What do I expect, a diamond stickpin? Figures I would find a piece of dirt. It feels greasy, tarry, not like dirt at all. Could it be opium? Maybe that's the secret of all these boxes. My baby brother's mother-in-law sews Percodan in the hem of her housecoats. Each of the compartments has a different piece of dirt in it.

I carry the tiger box carefully down the curved staircase and set it on the tray table next to Nathan's bed. The TV is slowly nursing them to sleep.

Ciz

Onlookers shout. Their yells move the road closer, twist and push it around my plot. The steel-spectacled deputy hits my boy in the mouth. Alp shudders like a dog shaking off ditch water. "That's it." A baby shrieks. Here with its mama. Mewling so loud I can't hear what the faces are saying, just see mouths mooing up and down.

Men push through the deputies, a bunch of cotton shirts, old-fashioned neckpieces. "Make the bastard talk about what he did to R. E. Lee's girl!"

I jump between them and Alp, cover him with as much of me as I can muster. A boot picks itself up, heel banging my hip. The flat of another lands solid in the small of my back. I think of my mother's hair, her eyebrows that we combed for fun with a toothbrush.

"Leave the woman be," Sheriff Garner bellows.

A kick to the ribs knocks me to the ground. Mother had an amber ring.

"Who's he calling a woman?" A boy's shrill voice. A yellow fog of words. Color of my soap. If I blink and wish hard enough, he'll disappear. Soap's almost ready to pour into tins. "I wouldn't take that not even in pitch dark. How "bout you. Oscar?" Laughter. "Not with a barge paddle."

A female cries, "Cleanse the sin from R. E. Lee's child."

Not even a regular child, but that man's prize. I crawl to Sheriff Garner's pant leg. "Let my son be. I swear he's good." My heart's rasping. "My boy's been with me all day. He can't fly."

The spectacled deputy takes off his belt. "Let's tend to the boy." One after another the men come, taking turns whipping. None hide their faces. My son's eyes swell shut. At least he's saved from seeing. The deputy dunks my son's other hand in the soap. This time Alp's scream digs a hole in the ground.

Agwe, Aizan. I mouth the names of ancient givers. The dirt road has filled with cars. Like corpses. A covered hack stops at a distance, inside are two women wearing feather and veil hats.

"Let's take them to the river."

They push me after my son. Red water's leaking from Alp's forearms where the skin is ripped. I scream. They ball a handkerchief and stick it in my mouth.

It's not to the river they take Alp, but into the trees. They shove him toward the sweet gums where his soap soldiers wrestle with twigs. I jerk, almost break from their grip. Let me go with him. He's afraid of when the weather changes too many times in one day, he's afraid of ladders and birds. They hold me back.

The mushrooms grow big as fists where they tie him up and pile on the kindling. Fifty, now there's a hundred streaming past me. Laughers, jerkers, spitters. They crash into the woods. A newspaperman takes out his tablet. "We're just swatting a few mosquitoes. That's not news."

Jelly

Nathan gives off mustiness, like those mansions of oil tycoons filled with rosewood music boxes that once played ragtime, old from not being touched except by cyclones of dust. "We were brought up rich, Jelly, but Daddy didn't spoil us."

"Shut up, Nathan," Natalie hisses. She takes love from the TV, laps up her stewed tomatoes when the actors eat their phantom meals.

"She talked like that to Daddy. Can you imagine?" Nathan's eyes brighten. "As a child her skin was smoother than petals. Her face, a breathing flower. Daddy sometimes just stared at her."

"That's it!" Natalie throws her Centrum Silver vitamins at him. The bottle strikes his chest. "Take a walk in the hall or I'll break your head and shit on your neck."

Nathan dutifully sits up, grips his cane, and struggles to stand.

"Now cut it off, cut if off," Natalie orders.

I turn off the oxygen, and take the tubes from her nose. The Pall Malls are next to her nasal spray. This is the holy moment when I light her cigarette, and her mouth sucks in smoke as if it were silk. Afterwards I sponge her underarms where the hairs are frail as cobwebs. "Never had a baby, did you, Natalie?"

Her belly is smooth as a girl's, no stretch marks. Just a scar on her buttocks like the glistening ripple a trout makes running under a full moon. I powder her, and she rolls onto her back. Her violet eyes go to the ceiling like she's in a staring contest with it. The sheen of her on my fingers is like dust from a moth's wings.

Ciz

I'm not afraid anymore. Hickory is king the woods. They re burning my son. I hear his screams. They must pull him from the fire to savor him. For thirty minutes my baby howls. Alp, it's your mama, honey love. You're named Alp after those cold tall mountains far away. Go there in your mind.

They burn him slow. The fine thigh pieces.

I say goodbye to my arms, feel a yank as they cord my wrists behind my back. Someone rips my apron. "Let's go swimming, sweetheart." They walk me to the bridge. Last sun ripples in the sluggish current. This is the river Alp was baptized in. Burning water. Three times the Methodist preacher took him under. Sweetish smoke. I wanted Alp to have as many safeguards as he could get.

The sun is a honed blade that gouges my heart out. It isn't thumping, and I don't feel it hit the side of my ribs. My heart is gone when they push a charred thing past me in a wheelbarrow. The thing has no legs. It raises up on its haunches, reaching out, no hands on the ends of its blackened wrists. Give me my smoke baby back. I'll plant him in the garden. I'll lie down beside him in the squash blossoms.

A man with a whiskey nose croaks, "I'm going to write the boys down there in Delight. Tell them about the barbeque we had this afternoon."

Townspeople crowd both sides of the river. There's a bunch behind me. Someone is playing an accordion. Someone is selling rock candy. Voices of rumbling earth and burrowed cicadas. Soon I won't know what a cicada is. My own mother will die again. Along with water, corn mush, son.

"Make way, make way, R. E. Wilson's on his way." And then I see the man who owns the dirt where they make me set my feet.

"This is the boy who done it, R. E." They push the blackened thing in the wheelbarrow at him. A burnt offering. He has a golden boy and girl with him, a twin set. Made out of cornsilk, sunlight, heavy cream, and wedding rings. When the great giver is angry it is hard to calm her. But her price is only that of a chicken.

Jelly

Natalie's room. They've sent me to look for their stereoscope.

On the dressing table there's a chrome-plated cigarette case too perfect to have been used much. Not like things in my family that have been touched and touched. You can feel back taxes and second mortgages on the hairbrushes.

The card box sits on the messed bedspread where Roland must have been kicking back and the stereoscope stares up from the nightstand. I used to fight with my baby brother over who got great-Gran's stereoscope first. You could disappear behind the eye squares for a few minutes, and when you looked up Sunday would be gone, along with the pork chops. My favorite card was of a Forbidden City girl's bound feet, her toes curling under to meet the heel. Lily feet.

What kind of pictures do the twins have? I lift the stereoscope to my face. True old-timer amusement. I feel that drop in temperature again, like when you're swimming and you hit a pocket of deep chill that takes you all the way back to the ice age.

The card photograph is of a barefoot corpse. Hanging from a bridge, a pretty woman in a calico dress. I can see the ripples in the brown river, and almost hear the sluggish gurgling. A postcard. Etched into the corner "copyright 1934--Arkansas--unmailable."

The calico skirt seems to take the wind and still it. Hanging with her head to the side, the woman is graceful like a ballet dancer at rest. Her toes point downward, tiny feet, like lilies below her hem. The trees crowd together. At the edge of the photograph is another hanging body, smaller than the woman's. Badly burned, too burned to tell what sex it is. Like the greasy dirt in the boxes.

Faces on the bridge. A handsome man stands out; his starched trousers set to shine for all time. His children are too pretty to be alive. The girl in a dress of magnolia petals, and the boy her impish double. They are staring, not quite solemn.

I breathe deeply. Take the card out of the stereoscope? Who is she? Why did they hang her on this afternoon? No, she wasn't a stunt actress of the day. I shrug, and slide the card into my pocket. Who can care about a still photograph after all the moving blood and dismemberment on TV? Maybe it's the silence that makes it so haunted, the subdued brown color like everything is drying leaves--the faces, the bridge, the water, the rope--ready to crumble but when you try to blow the leaves away they end up back in your face.

I'm about to cut the light off when I see the studio portrait on top of the dresser. A heavy brass frame encloses the twins holding hands in a mock apple orchard. It's supposed to be summer, the long hot American summer. They must be eight or nine. Too blond-skinned. Like things from comets or the Milky Way. Nathan, in a miniature three-piece suit, a handkerchief in the breast pocket, smiles at Natalie, whose hair hangs in sausage curls to her waist. Her dress is chiffon. The dog would catch anyone's attention. A white bloodhound. Its leash--a charm bracelet around Natalie's wrist. They are the same children as those inside the stereoscope card.

"I saw the dog you had when you were kids," I say, setting up a TV tray table beside Natalie's bed to hold the stereoscope and card box.

"That's Blue," Natalie says in an irritated voice. "Where's dinner?"

Five minutes is all their strained asparagus and turkey meatloaf take in the microwave. I smell cinnamon, as if the ghosts of apples are boiling on the stove.

Nathan holds forth while Natalie gobbles meatloaf as if it were rare filet. "I can still see that noon when Daddy told us. 'Hurry dress, wear your old shoes. Blue has been found!' We expected a picnic on the river. Tongue sandwiches, a feast of wild strawberries and grape peaches."

The twins stay up pouring over their stereoscope. When they are asleep, I walk enough from the house so that it is not their ground, and then I get to my knees and bury the card.

Ciz

Devil is the name the old griot women give the evil hounds. Devil is the name I give the one who puts a rope around my neck. A man ties my torn apron. For an instant I think kindness. Then his hands fill my pockets with pebbles. I want to think about the rock doves singing when Alp and I played with our chessmen all through the slow part of the day. Alp, they're going to hang you too, even if you're already dead. A stone hits me in the stomach, then a stick. Wrens winding down, day almost done. Luscious dusk. I raise my face, even as a peach pit hits my forehead. Alp, there's still so much corn meal mush left, I should have let you eat every whisper of it.

"Let the woman go," someone shouts, but is drowned out.

Where could I possibly go now that I've been here? The cypress roots are whispering my name; be strong, the river bottom calls. Ciz, Ciz, your boy is safe.

It's Mr. R. E. who decides what to do with me, who nods his head.

Sheriff says, "Okay, Ciz, let's get it over with." He pulls his pants up, takes a hop as he adjusts the belt. A habit. He'll get to do that ten thousand more times before he dies. A rope has been tied to a joint, the noose end coils in the dust.

My ashy son hangs over the water; my son who has no hands is buried in the air on the summer vines. A breeze twitches through the silver maples, their naked undersides shine. The photographer is moving closer, his camera like a box lunch at an ice cream social. "Let's see you do a jig, Ciz." Is it true when they take a photograph at the moment of death, that's where your soul stays?

Jelly

I'm late with their breakfast, but when I serve them their toast burnt black, neither complains. They smack and ask for more. In the kitchen I find the bread that has green in the middle, toast it and cover the mold with grape jelly. I can hear them fighting.

"I'll throw this plate at you, Nathan. I'll really bean you. I don't know where your stinking card went. What do I care? You have a box full of them."

"But that one. Natalie, that was our history."

When I bring them their toast, which both find delicious, I hear myself asking about the dog.

Nathan looks at me thoughtfully as he sips his decaf coffee through a crazy straw. "Blue was from the medieval white Talbot Hound, who died out as a breed around 600 A.D. My father was amazed when he came upon a Talbot birthed in an Arkansas sharecropper's lean-to. An immaculate conception. Poor Blue." He pulls his terrycloth robe around him. "We saved the bastard's ashes to mix with our own."

"So that's what all that dirt upstairs in those boxes is?" I ask.

"I'm not sure I know what you're talking about." Nathan's waterless blue eyes follow me as I carry the tops of the TV trays into the kitchen. Does he know that I know? What is it I know? That he witnessed something? That he keeps it with him, worships it, relic of a lost place and time? That he's enchanted by a calico dress? A sluggish river? I don't worry about that old filthy rag of a world that he comes from. Whatever he and his kind thought was the cat's meow has been chewed under. There's worse things to be afraid of these days.

Ciz

I drop. Ripples of heat rise from the trees. I'm listening to the leaves turn over, tinkling, showing off their silver undersides.

"Does it hurt, Mama?" Alp asks. I spit the handkerchief from my mouth, a honeydew voice flows through my tongue--we're the angels, not the murdered ones.

The blond children play on the riverbank while the limbs of the black walnuts drift in the current. The girl looks out from behind her brother, half-smiles, and ducks. Peek-a-boo, I see you. Wind caresses. A sickle moon waits in the sky. Barn swallows offer up pitifully glad songs.

I blink and walk out into air. Giver, let me live.

Stephanie Dickinson was raised in rural Iowa and now lives in the Bowery. Her work appears in Mudfish, Cream City Review, Chelsea, Fourteen Hills, Nimrod, and Puerto del Sol, among others. Her first novel, Half Girl, is presently before publishers.