Miss Annie thinks I’m a saint and a little girl. 

“Killin’ a cat is bad luck. And I believe that.” Miss Annie looks at me simultaneously nodding and shaking her head. “One once wrapped hitself  ‘round my momma’s arm with hits claws sunk in, and my daddy—he couldn’t get hit off fo’ nothin’—so he got his shotgun and he shot that cat,” she frowns, her jaw shuddering, “a month later he died.” 

***

I have a confession to make: I stole a crucifix. I saw it, pale-green, nestled in a tissue box on a cluttered counter in a house full of people and I knew it was going home with me.

I smirked as I bore it down my own little Hallway of Sorrows, silently cleansing rooms, exorcizing oblivious souls that darkened my path. I didn’t realize it could glow at first, but once the thought clouded my brain I ran to a windowless bathroom and held it to the sconce above the mirror. 

Staring into my pupils with my arm stretched above, I could see myself within myself. In the margins of my vision my skin was pale and poor, dark under the eyes. I didn’t break contact as I reached blindly and swatted at the lightswitch. For a half- second I swayed  in static dark. Jesus blurred into milky neon focus and doubled between me and my reflection, which stayed with me, a non-committal ghost. 

How long would He glow with His borrowed light? I clenched my jaw, swallowing the urge to vomit confessions into His smooth plastic eyes which were neither open nor closed. Tears rippled and I held them in my lower lids, imagining they were wells as deep as I could make them before they started to spill out. 

I fought the release of crying, which is perhaps less like fighting and more like wrestling to pull elbows and wrists out of sopping wet shirt sleeves, where the thick cotton won’t stretch and slide up your back but rubs and pulls skin—like a wink from the lower lid that brings the cheek with it.

***

Sinews of webs clot the corners of Miss Annie's kitchen and a half-dozen wind chimes hang still inside the glass. Her window watches over paint-chipped planters of dead grass and dried flowers. The southern sun spills in deep. A poor moth, the palest green and tiny, fluttered in the sticky lace of a fiery spider’s web. But the spider is dead.

We live down the road from a cemetery. All the flowers in the graveyard are fake, gaily perched in sad stone, marking lives that were. Piercing shrieks of vermillion and turquoise, lemon-yellow—fuschia even!—patriotic blues and eternal whites, mocking green leaves that forever reach to heaven but never die. Not one wilted petal or crippled stalk. No drooping deaths.

I was standing at the screen door, squinting at the graveyard (which I can just make out past the kids swinging from the walnut tree), when Miss Annie’s friend pulled in the drive. He said God sent him. He gives his money to the Daystar television network because they healed him. Paul talks slowly in an excited smiling whisper, always about to reveal a mystery. There is no mystery. His eyes dance. He pauses unbearably to make you wait as long as possible before he drops head-shaking truth in your lap like it’s a bundled-up blanket. “They said if I needs a miracle, alls I has to do is reach out at the television. Well. My arms is fine, but I been having trouble with my leg. So’s I thought, Why, Paul, if your legs is hurt, what difference is it to reach out with your foot? So’s that’s what I did. I pulled the hem of my pants up, leaned back in my chair and I jest pointed my foot right at the television when they says to. And I feels somethin’ happen. It was Jesus bumps. I got ‘em shiverin’ up and down my body. I stand up and dance ‘round that livin’ room and even,” pause, “the kitchen. And I been walkin’ with a dance ever sence!”

He showed up on our stoop with a bag of Red Delicious Apples the day after Valentine’s Day.

“I didn’t know where I was goin’ when I left, but now I’m here.”

Jesus sits in his living room, in an old rocking chair Paul leaves empty for Him. He creaks it back and forth, unseen, grateful someone saved Him a seat. I was grateful too. We were out of apples.

*** 

Miss Annie has lived on the same street her whole life.  She came over to give me a cutting of her purple Wandering Jew (my mother can only whisper those words). She had rooted it in a plastic cup and told me to get it in some dirt and in a good window (the one that faces her house is a good one). The silvery tendrils spilled and meandered, like those lost in the desert, craning necks looking for Egypt, wondering who among them might find Holy Water. They never imagined they might be cut off and tossed into a Red Solo cup; handed over to a gentile neighbor who would leave them in stagnant water.

***

It’s summer now. June. I’m thirty-five and hanging clothes on a clothesline for the first time in my life. I don't know if I’m doing it right or wrong, if there is such a way. I know Miss Annie is watching me from her kitchen window, wondering why I’m doing it the way I’m doing it—bobbing between the lines, heaving the damp clothes draped over my arm, sometimes using clothespins, sometimes not; swatting flies and things humming around my ears, dusting the red clay from my feet, trying to stay in the grass but my soles turn brown anyway. If there is such a way, the clothes have found it— in the wind and in the sun and in the grass and clay because I didn’t use pins. Miss Annie knows the way, and she knows I’ll find it hanging clothes on the clothesline.

We think the walnut trees are dying. There are two in the side yard; the drive circles one, a  rainbow swing ropes the other. They green up every Spring and drop thudding lime-scented walnuts all Summer. And every once in a while they drop a big branch, which is a small indication that they are dying because they are hollow. Our landlord said he would take money off our rent if we cut them down for him. He said we could keep the wood. Miss Annie said we should make a table for ourselves:

“Them branches—those are your table legs right there.” 

We told Miss Annie that we are moving. “Well, I’ll jest cry m’self t’death.”

I’m waiting for the bare harvested-end of Autumn, when the trees have shivered off their foliage and stand, rattling stalks under my breath, and the cold-crisp air has settled and lays draped, wrapped, formed to shoulders, tucking up under my collarbones. The last bit of fiery leaves will fall, leaving the landscape subdued—easy on the eyes. Neon Jesus is cradled in my underwear drawer, tucked under thongs, socks, an old nursing bra, and the sash for a robe long-gone. I haven’t held him to the light in over a year.   

I was driving not real late, before nine or so. A flash of rabbit streaked straight across the road and something after it. A sickening thump resonated under my truck. The rabbit somehow made it. I didn’t know it was a cat at the time it all happened so fast. The next day I drove the stretch and saw it in the grassy berm—a tabby lighter than peaches and cream. I felt a tinge of sorrow and imagined the life I may have taken it from. Had it left behind a litter of squeaking kittens? Was an old shaky woman setting a dish of milk out? Maybe it was a barn cat used to hunting mice and snakes. 

It’s been a few months since our paths crossed and I took its little life. 

Bad luck? I could believe that.