Caitlin Kiernan - Alabaster

"Now why didn't I see that?" he says.

"'Cause you ain't trying, that's why," Dancy says and spits what's left of the yellow jellybean out into the palm of her left hand.

"Yeah? Well, maybe, or maybe you're just gettin' too good for me."

Dancy adds the three captured checkers to the neat stack in front of her. "King me," she says and pops the jellybean back into her mouth.

"Look at that. Now you're gettin' my checkers all sticky."

"It isn't any fun when you don't even try to win. I don't want to play anymore. Tell me a story, instead."

"Bad luck to leave a game unfinished."

Dancy stares at him for a moment, trying to remember if she's ever heard it was bad luck not to finish a game of checkers, the sort of thing her grandmother would have taught her, if it was true, so she's pretty sure he's just making it up.

"I ain't never heard-"

"You haven't ever heard."

"I haven't ever heard it was bad luck not to finish a game of checkers."

"Lots of things you ain't heard, child."

Dancy fishes another jellybean from the big bag on the table, a pink one, and she thinks about putting it back because the pink ones taste like Pepto-Bismol.

"That's why I come way out here to talk to you," she says and puts the pink jellybean back in the bag, takes out an orange one, instead.

"I look like a schoolteacher?"

"I ain't never seen a schoolteacher," Dancy mumbles around the orange jellybean, "so I wouldn't know if you do or not."

"Bet your Momma don't let you sass her like that," Mr. Jube says and looks over his shoulder at the door, at the dark windows on either side of it like bookends.

"You could tell again me about the time you saw the loup-garou, or the time you caught the two-headed snapping turtle and-"

"I never said that was a snapper. Just an old cooter terrapin, that's all," Mr. Jube says, still looking at the door, and Dancy sighs and swallows the orange jellybean without bothering to chew it.

"Or the time you went deep-sea fishin' and-"

"Hush a minute, girl," the old man growls at her and holds up one index finger like he's pointing the way to Heaven, so Dancy sits still and waits for him to be finished with whatever's gotten his attention. Whatever's he's listening to, listening for, and then she hears it, too, and "Oh," she whispers. "What is that, Mr. Jube?"

"You just sit right there, Dancy," he whispers back, "and don't you say nothin' else, not one word, till I say so," and now she's afraid, the urgent tremble in his voice and this sound she's never heard before; something far away, but coming closer, rumble so deep she feels it in her bones, her teeth, all the way down in her soul.

"You shouldn't'a come out here tonight, Dancy," Mr. Jube says. "But you didn't know."

Dancy shakes her head, no, no, no, she couldn't have known, and she grips the edge of the table, grits her teeth together tight, and the rumbling sound rises and falls like hurricane breath and locomotive wrecks. The earth splitting apart beneath her feet and the sky above her head broken by the weight of the stars; the bag of jellybeans falls over, spilling a rainbow spray on the cabin floor, and the checkers skitter and dance across the board.

"I should'a told you all this a long time ago," he says. "Guess I should'a told you a hell of a lot of things… " but she can hardly hear him now, regretful words buried deep in the roar, and across the room a quart Ball mason jar full of pennies and nickels tumbles off a windowsill and bursts. Dancy shuts her eyes tight, not wanting to see what could ever make such a terrible racket. So loud there's no room left for anything else, the whole wide world pressed flat and dry and silent as an old briar rose held forever between Bible-thin pages, the world pressed brittle, and she can't even remember how to pray.

The salty, copper taste of blood, sharp pain nailed between her eyes, and "You make it stop!" she screams. "Oh god, Mr. Jube, make it stop right now!" and it does, meanest splinter of the empty moment between her frantic heartbeats, space between the throbbing in her head, and the only thing left behind is the murmuring swamp outside the cabin-the frogs and cricket fiddles, cicadas and night birds. Dancy slowly opens her eyes, blinks at the back of Mr. Jube's bald head, and when she wipes her mouth on the back of her hand, there's a smear of spit and crimson.

I bit my tongue, she thinks. That's all, I just bit my own stupid tongue.

"Now, you do what I said," Mr. Jube tells her, firm and a bright hint of fear around the edges of his voice, the way her grandmother sounded the day that Dancy found a rabid fox hiding under their back porch.

"This is all gonna be done and finished 'fore you even know it. You listenin' to me, child?"

"Jesus, ain't it done already?" she asks, and he glares over his shoulder at her.

"What d'you think your Momma would think about you blasphemin' like that?"

"I bet you she'd say something worse'n that, if she was here."

Mr. Jube shakes his head and turns back to the door, the blank, unseeing windows. "Well, she ain't here, so you're gonna mind me. And this ain't done just yet. We got a little bit more to come. But we gonna be fine, Dancy. You do exactly what I say and everything's gonna be jake."

"Yes sir," she says, trying hard not to let him hear how scared she really is, trying to feel the way a grown-up would feel, brave like her grandmother when she shot the rabid fox.

"What you want me to do?"

"Stay where you are, and I want you to start counting backwards from one hundred. Not out loud, just start counting to yourself, in your head."

"Backwards from a hundred."

"And don't you say a word, girl, no matter what you see. Think about them numbers. Imagine you got a stick and you're drawing numbers in the sand. When you get done drawing one, imagine that you take your left foot and wipe the sand smooth again before you draw the next number. Can you do that?"

"Yes sir. I can do that."

"Then we both gonna be right as rain," he tells her, and a second later there's a knock at the door. Dancy looks at the checkerboard, bad luck not to finish a game, and wishes she'd stayed home and watched her mother sew, wishes that she'd followed Eleanore Road out to the hilly place where she sits sometimes and gazes across the tops of the pines at the far-away lights of Milligan, wishes she were any place instead of in this cabin at the edge of the black lake at the end of Wampee Creek.

"Now, Dancy," Mr. Jube says. "You start countin' now," and she does.

Moonlight and magnolia, starlight in your hair, all the world a dream, a dream come true, did it really happen, was I really there, was I really there with you…

A vast lion of white connect-the-dots fire, frigid pinpricks against eternity, and the imaginary lions men draw between the stars. Capricious swipe of a twinkling paw, and light falls from midnight autumn skies, November 1833, and the glowing dust of comets and all the things a small blue world brushes against in its lonely race around the sun; bright and frozen things to burn as they streak and scream and fall, falling since the universe drew its first scalding breath and coughed up Creation, but finally falling down. Angels down from Heaven, and fingers groping in a dark place touch something soft and cold that burns-

We lived our little drama, we kissed in a field of white.

November 13th, 1833, and the wide Southern night sky gone bright as noon. Startled men and women coming suddenly awake in their beds, squinting, dazzled eyes for the darkness that wasn't there. And This must be judgment day, they whispered and listened for Gabriel's trumpets and Seraphim explanation. Terrified, amazed, humbled at this end, surely, this ice-white curtain of flame drawing closed across history, and there are times when all men pray to one thing or another.