Nebraska

She was up late, sewing draperies and slipping the pink-tuliped chintz onto rods for Claude to put up in the morning. Everything was jumbled from moving in, nothing was in its place; even the twin bed in the sewing room was just iron springs on a pinewood frame. She stitched a drapery hem and snipped the thread at the machine's presser foot. She could hear Claude tramping up the staircase and stopping to look in on the girls. And then she heard him creak open the door to the sewing room and peer in without a word as she stooped over her plastic bobbin case. Without looking up, Avis said, “You awake too?”

She could hear his slow pant but Claude was apparently just staring at her as she picked through spools of navy blue and black in search of a simple dark green. She asked, “How you like the pink?” but Claude said nothing. He could have been an onlooker at a grisly street accident, or a jazzed-up boy who'd put a coin in the slot to gape at her body in a peep show.

Avis asked, “You okay?” and turned; but the sewing-room door was already touching shut. And then she saw a deep red paint abruptly spray over the wallpaper and haltingly trickle down and little by little disappear. And when she smelled the penny odor of blood, she knew she'd had an inspiration of evil in the past.

***

Avis placed the flat of a knife on a garlic clove and pounded it hard with her fist. She peeled away the dry husk and then chopped the pink garlic toe inside, faintly singing as she dumped the choppings into a bowl. The girls were at the dining-room table, saying silly things and giggling as they drew with crayons on a split-open grocery sack.

Yard pictures in the windowpanes were warped and slurred by rain. Claude was sitting outside in his Parks and Recreation Department truck, waiting for the rain to pass, the radio probably tuned to a Royals game. He looked at his new property and lit a second cigarette. Gray smoke tumbled against the window glass. He tipped his cap down over his eyes and appeared to nap.

She could hear the girls arguing over the red crayon. The more Lorna yelled for it, the more Priscilla ignored her. Avis looked at the recipe and spooned oregano into the bowl, then went into the dining room, drying her hands on a paper towel. Lorna was crying. Avis said, “Just give her the red, Priscilla.”

“She always hogs it!”

“How long have you had it?”

“All day!” Lorna said.

Avis looked down at the big house her girls had crayoned on the grocery-bag paper. One upper room contained the huge round heads and scarecrow bodies that meant human beings to Lorna. Priscilla was completing work on a sickroom. A yellow-haired boy was axing an overweight woman who was hooked up to orange tubes and green hoses. Huge amounts of blood were springing from her belly in raindrops and petals of red.

“Yuck, Priscilla.”

“Momma, it's a story.”

“Whose story?”

Priscilla kept the red crayon in her lap as she worked on the yellow-haired boy.

“Are you listening, Priscilla? Who's the boy killing?”

Lorna looked at her sister's picture and said, “The momma!”

Avis crouched by her younger daughter and put a finger under a girl who had brown sticks for legs. The girl's wrists joined around the green coveralls of a white man with jackstrawed hair. “And who's this, Lorna?”

Lorna screwed up her face as she looked at the brown girl in the picture, then smiled with accomplishment. “She the bitch!”

“How'd you learn that word, Lorna?”

Lorna squirmed a little.

“Priscilla?”

Priscilla snickered and Avis said, “You want to get slapped, you keep it up.”

Claude pushed open the yard door and stamped the rain off. Lorna jumped from her chair and leapt into her daddy's arms. He picked her up overhead and kissed her knees and let her drop to his belly. “Saberhagen got hisself another win,” Claude said.

Avis couldn't stop pressing. “How do you know the story, Priscilla?”

The girl wouldn't speak. She was as psychic as Avis, as skeptical as Claude. Her mother thought she'd lose her second sight pretty soon and happily accept just being ordinary. Claude sauntered around to look at the picture and complicate everything by saying, “You good, baby girl! You got talent! You know she could draw like that, Avis?”

Avis asked, “How's the story come out?”

Priscilla got a stupid look as she peered out at the yard. Avis presumed she was seeing it played out, but only like a creepy late-night movie on their black-and-white television. Priscilla glanced down at her picture again and said, “The girl gets killed.”

“You get pictures in your head?”

“Sorta.”