LITMIR.BIZ

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descendants were folded into the pages of time, hidden as they were in the convoluted bloodlines that land conquest and slave auctions and breeding rapes brought. For unbeknownst to the butler, he was both a descendant of the Ethiopic scribes of Geez and a distant Kinwell forefather. And he had secretly taught himself to read and write without ever understanding his burning need to do so, nor why he knew the gravity of names. So it was no surprise that when he’d heard about the birth of twins holding hands—that their fingers were fused at the tip—he snuck into the parlor where the plantation owner’s old African expedition letters were kept, for there he knew he would find the requisite signs omens bones. He sifted through them until he was obliged to write two names down on a scrap of paper, his own kind of papyrus: Osiris and Nephthys. And in the naming of the Kinwell twins, he satisfied his ancient urge to scribe something on the wall of being that was undiminished, everlasting.

      But Nephthys had no way of knowing about the butler’s indelible hand as she drove through the streets of the quadrants with the colonel’s wife in her car. What she knew was that her mother told her that the old plantation owner liked to say that niggers came from a place called Nowhere, and in that place there was nothing, because what made them and the things that they made held no value at all. That they had no part in the treasures of a dark continent, being just animals among many in the kingdoms of those lands. And her mother had said that the butler told her this was not true.

      Nephthys turned onto the bridge and looked at the colonel’s wife in the rearview mirror. “From wuh I know, a man from the old days gave my mother the name.”

      “Oh.” The colonel’s wife would have liked to talk more about that, outlandish as it sounded, for their exchanges were without praise or scorn. But she had a more pressing question. “I heard that the woman who does the Lottery is your niece. Amber Kinwell, right?”

      Nephthys reached for her flask, bracing as if a box had been opened that she preferred to keep closed.

      “Such a gift.”

      “Don’t know if it’s a gift.”

      “How can she live with such a talent?”

      “Talent?”

      “Ability. How does she live with it?”

      “Don’t know how much livin’ is possible.” And here Nephthys thought of Amber in that realm where she’d left her.

      They rode on, the colonel’s wife now silent in the backseat as she gazed out the window at the quadrants. Over a century before, from his controversial appointed post, Frederick Douglass had signed the deeds of Washingtonians still believing in the dream of owning something that had already been taken out of so many hands; places marked by the blood absorbed and bodies buried beneath the quadrants. Many years later, the quadrants would be consumed by a neoplasm of surveyors and developers, a superstate of cranes and constructs. Neighborhoods and vestiges of other eras would vanish into the folds of time. Little old ladies and cane-walking men would amble the city in a state of stupefied grief, pointing at unrecognizable places made more unrecognizable by the Lego-block stacking of pricey loft apartments and the sprawling offices of government agencies and their contractors.

      The colonel’s wife peered out the window. The closer they got to the brick-faced institution, the gaunter and more wide-eyed she became, so that by the time Nephthys drove down Martin Luther King Jr. Avenue and turned onto the medical campus, she felt her body stiffening as if struck by rigor mortis.

      Nephthys stopped and turned off the car. In the silence she felt that familiar unease each time she made this passage, for its destination made her think about Nurse Higgins’s son.

      At last the colonel’s wife put her hand out and gripped the door handle as if it might keep her from falling through the floor of the Plymouth and into the colorless bottomless chasm of the Void. “A couple hours,” she said hoarsely, and got out of the car.

      * * *

      Nephthys watched the colonel’s wife walk to the entrance slowly. Two orderlies were waiting, receiving her as if she were first in line at a wake. The large door closed behind her, where she would be locked in the space-time continuum of St. Elizabeths until she came out again. Nephthys looked away from the entrance and stared at the dashboard. Now the Alexandria woman’s questions loomed in her mind. She shook her head, trying to make the thoughts forming dissipate. The river and her brother. The dream about the shark.

      She recalled that Amber had been twelve years old when the dreams started. They seemed unstoppable by the time she turned seventeen, and her prophecies pelted the house in an endless drip of water. Nephthys remembered that final day clearly. She was sitting with Amber on the deck of the front porch, listening to her talk of a man who would freeze to death in front of the Morton’s Department Store and the little girl who would fall down an elevator shaft in a code-shy building in one of the quadrants. And that was when Nephthys realized that she couldn’t take any more. She couldn’t bear the constant death tolls that only deepened the bitterness of her own grief. And every time she looked at Amber, she wondered how it was that she seemed to know so much about the downfall of others and so little about what had happened to her twin. How could Amber not have known what was to happen to her father when she seemed to know so much about everyone else? And when Nephthys looked at her niece, she loved her and hated her too.

      So there were reasons why she left Amber at the bottom of the hill, Nephthys reminded herself, staring at the cold facade of St. Elizabeths. Reasons why she drank. She took a sip from her flask and noticed an orderly staring at her from one of the windows. When he seemed to realize that she saw him, he stepped away quickly. Nephthys knew it would be several hours before the colonel’s wife emerged from the labyrinths of the building, her face sheet white from listening to the messages of her son’s madness.

      She turned the key in the ignition. Her half finger throbbed and she looked into its lightless tip. It bothered her that there might be other kinds of messages. Like the long-ago song riffs she sometimes heard in her head. Like the bottles that moved of their own accord in her apartment. Like what she thought might have been in the wall mirror, now broken on the floor. Or who. She gripped the steering wheel, put her foot on the gas pedal, and drove away.

      SORCERY

      At the site of the hit-and-run accident that left a pregnant woman in a pool of blood on a street in Anacostia, an infant splashed inside her mother’s cooling fluids. As the woman moved from one plane of existence to another, the preborn lay quiet in her amniotic water, listening to the sound of her progenitor’s heartbeat slowing to a stop. And in accordance with the law of reciprocity, where nothing is taken without something granted, Death whispered the star recordings of lives into the infant’s ear, gifting her with the vision of another life’s end. With each tale of reckoning the infant’s eyes widened anew, unblinking in the darkness of the womb. And when finished whispering the register of fates, Death touched the neonate’s forehead lightly with its finger, leaving a mark.

      * * *

      Amber stood at the kitchen sink, staring through the window at a small stand of old trees. She was doing this more and more, and each time she felt like someone was staring back at her, waiting. But everything was as it had been the day before, with the lily patches and tree gnarls and knobs unchanged. The places where lightning had written its name on the bark remained. There was no one there.

      Puzzled, she turned away from the window and finished washing the breakfast dishes. Now that Dash was off to school, the house was quiet, save for the creaking of its hull. She stood listening to the silence, feeling listless. Unlike so many other days, she didn’t want to idle away her time washing and cutting the spoils of the feral garden. She was not in the mood to fill the long hours with endless tasks: shaking out the sediment-covered blankets; wiping condensation from glass; scraping the verdigris from the kitchen chairs; gouging mud from the hallway floor planks; collecting salt from corners.

      She poured herself a glass of water and sat down at the table, watching particles float by in the cool, interminable current like phytoplankton. But even in that calm, flashes of the dream about Dash took hold and she began to fret once more, for the dream seeped into everything. She stood

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