his, squeezed her roughly at the wrist. Varina tried to pull away but at the last minute faltered like she didn’t know what to do, did not want to offend. The center of their bodies glowed in the orange of kerosene lamps, the only light left lit, and they stood there in their awkward tableau like dancers primed for the music to start.
The man’s question came again, and Rue caught the very ends of it. “Wartime,” he’d said.
Varina was not giggling now. The center of her body was so strangely tight and still and she said then, quite harshly, “Please.” At that he twisted, reached out his other hand. He yanked up the good blue fabric of her dress as if it had offended him. He pushed her against the wall and tilted her body wholly back like a swinging bell, her thin, pale fighting legs for the clapper. There was the sharp sound of ripping fabric, of seams collapsing. Something skittered, a button perhaps, then a sharp intake of breath, and now Rue could see Varina’s pink bared thighs. Rue balled herself up and disappeared.
But the image of Varina’s pale hand, tensed and gripped by the pristine white glove, seemed to imprint itself wholly in Rue’s dark hiding place, and she couldn’t tell if her eyes were open or whether they were shut. She listened to the thudding of her blood in her ears and told herself if Miss Varina wanted to reveal her she need only call across the room. Rue reasoned there was nothing to be done, nothing she could do; she herself was still bound by the lock.
Rue began then to hum, not aloud but in her head, trying to put right the words the minstrels had sung: the wilderness, the wilderness. It had been lovely music, no matter the color their faces were painted. She heard Varina scream out loud just the once and thought of the wilderness, a place to run for both of them.
The abrupt turning of the lock seemed like violence, the lid cracking full open was like a trigger pulled. The dim of the room felt like too much bright and Rue squinted and there was Varina, alone, with tracks of tears ruining her rouged face.
“Varina.” She reached out her hand. Varina smacked it immediately away.
With her head bowed and her legs jellied Rue stepped out of the box at Varina’s command. She straightened Varina’s pretty blue dress so it fell down again in the perfect circle it had held before.
“We ought to get to sleep,” Varina was saying. “It’s very late, isn’t it?”
Rue shrugged, she didn’t know. She looked around the room, suspicious of its dark corners, of what lay behind the minstrels’ curtains, even suspicious of the box she’d just come out from.
“He gone?” Rue asked quietly.
Varina sniffed, choked on a sob and stifled another back. “Who?”
This time when Rue put out her hand Varina took it, and Rue was shocked with how cold Varina’s hand was, and clammy. Was this the hand the man had held? Now she could not remember which it had been. It felt like the memory was slipping away from her, like she’d just sat up from sleep and tried to grasp at the tendrils of a nightmare. Who would want to remember this?
“I’m very tired.” Varina did not look tired. Her eyes were red-rimmed and more aware than Rue had ever seen them, like someone had forced them open, peeled back the lids. “Take me to bed.”
Rue did, if taking was the word for it. She followed behind Varina through the still, sleeping house, a white girl and her shadow. They moved like they were walking through a graveyard, afeared of raising the dead. Every movement felt too loud underfoot to Rue, the night seemed so fragile, the air made all of glass.
THE RAVAGING
In grief, the town chose to sit up with their dead. Rue did not altogether care for the idea that had rose amongst the people, that they ought to hold a town-wide wake in respect of the children that had died. Wakes were for the living, she figured. Their grief, no matter how good, would not bring