From the Dust Returned

Ask to be pure rain and you fell on everything. Ask to be the moon and suddenly you looked down to see your pale light painting lost towns the color of tombstones and spectral ghosts.

Cecy. Who extracted your soul and pulled forth your impacted wisdom, and could transfer it to animal, vegetable, or mineral; name your poison.

No wonder the cousins lingered.

And along about sunset, before the dreadful fire, they climbed to the attic to stir her bed of Egyptian sands with their breath.

“Well,” said Cecy, eyes shut, a smile playing about her mouth. “What would your pleasure be?”

“I—” said Peter.

“Maybe—” said William and Philip.

“Could you—” said Jack.

“Take you on a visit to the local insane asylum,” guessed Cecy, “to peek inside people’s corkscrew heads?”

“Yes!”

“Done!” said Cecy. “Go lie on your cots in the barn. Over, up, and—out!”

Like corks, their souls popped. Like birds, they flew. Like bright needles, they shot in various crazed asylum ears.

“Ah!” they cried in delight.

While they were gone, the barn burned.

In all the shouting and confusion, the running for water, the general ramshackle hysteria, everyone forgot who was in the barn or what the high-flying cousins and Cecy, asleep, might be up to. So deep in her rushing dreams was she, that she felt neither the flames, nor the dread moment when the walls fell and four human-shaped torches self-destroyed. A clap of thunder banged across country, shook the skies, knocked the windblown essences of cousins through mill-fans, while Cecy, with a gasp, sat straight up and gave one shriek that shot the cousins home. All four, at the moment of concussion, had been in various asylum bins, prying trapdoor skulls to peek in at maelstroms of confetti the colors of madness, the dark rainbows of nightmare.

“What happened?” cried Jack from Cecy’s mouth.

“What!” said Philip, moving her lips.

“My god.” William stared from her eyes.

“The barn burned,” said Peter. “We’re lost!”

The Family, soot-faced in the smoking yard, turned like a traveling minstrel’s funeral and stared up at Cecy in shock.

“Cecy?” called Mother, wildly. “Is someone with you?”

“Me, Peter!” shouted Peter from her lips.

“Philip!”

“William!”

“Jack!”

The souls counted off from Cecy’s tongue.

The Family waited.

Then, as one, the four young men’s voices asked the final, most dreadful question:

“Didn’t you save just one body?”

The Family sank an inch into the earth, burdened with a reply they could not give.