Darcey Steinke - Jesus Saves

The bear said to the butterfly,

“Come back and be my friend.”

The butterfly said, “No I won't,

we've come now to the end.”

The poem went on about a brown bear and a place where butterflies sang and cattails were pink and ducklings yellow. She imagined Sandy's soul, like diaphanous cotton candy charged with static.

* * *

Switching off the lamp with the lace shade, Ginger pulled back the comforter, and got into bed. She was relieved the sheets weren't swarming with Little Mermaids. Downstairs, Ruth Patrick and her father sat quietly together on the couch in the basement, waiting for the spot about the memorial service on the eleven o’clock news, and she heard the boy snoring in the room next door. After the service he'd thrown a piece of gravel at a little girl, and when his mother yelled, he'd started crying and continued in the car all the way back to the house.

Ginger opened the jewelry box on the little table beside the bed. A tiny ballerina popped up, bits of lace for her skirt, a dab of pink paint for a bodice, a dab of brown for her bun, moving in circles on the tips of her toes to the tinkling notes of a lullaby. Ginger looked out the window at the houses spinning out in curly cul-de-sacs like the paisleys the orderly at the hospital called Tears of the Buddha. She remembered the shining police lights, the frenzied dogs, saliva stringing off their pink gums, and the tiny emaciated creature lying on the afghan, strands of her hair encased in ice. Eyes staring through the broken bricks and ice-covered ferns. Smeared with feces and covered with spider bites, Sandy's face strange and shrunken like a blue gray cat's, already transported to the nether world, a wood nymph or a forest fairy, found only inside the pages of a children's book.