Alabaster

"Well, then what're you waiting for," the thing whispers from the lips of its shabby patchwork skin. "Show me what you got."

The fire crackles and roars at the night sky lightening slowly towards dawn. Dancy sits on a fallen log at the side of the red dirt road leading back to Waycross and watches as the spreading flames begin to devour the leafy walls of the kudzu tu

"Well, I guess you showed me what for," the blackbird says. It's perched on the log next to her, the fire reflected in its beady eyes. "Maybe next time I'll keep my big mouth shut."

"You think there's ever go

"Lord, I hope not," the birds squawks. "That was just, you know, a figure of speech."

"Oh. I see."

"Where you headed next?" the bird asks.

"I'm not sure."

"I thought maybe the angels-"

"They'll show me," Dancy says, and she slips the carving knife back into her duffel bag and pulls the drawstrings tight again. "When it's time, they'll show me."

And then neither of them says anything else for a while, just sit there together on the fallen pine log, as the fire she started in the cellar behind the trailer burns and bleeds black smoke into the hyacinth sky.

Alabaster

The albino girl, whose name is Dancy Flammarion, has walked a long way since the fire in Bainbridge, five nights ago. It rained all morning long, and the blue-grey clouds are still hanging sullen and low above the pines, obscuring the wide south Georgia sky. But she's grateful for the clouds, for anything that hides her from the blistering June sun. She's already thanked both St. George and St. Anthony the Abbott for sending her the clouds, because her grandmother taught her they were the patron saints of people suffering from skin diseases. Her grandmother taught her lots of things. The damp air smells like pine straw and the fat white toadstools growing along the side of the highway. Dancy knows not to eat those, not ever, no matter how hungry she gets. Her grandmother taught her about toadstools, too.

She stops, shifting the weight of her heavy old duffel bag from one shoulder to the other, the duffel bag and the black umbrella tied to it with hemp twine, and looks back the way she's just come. Sometimes it's hard to tell if the voices she hears are only inside her head or if they're coming from somewhere else. The highway glistens dark and wet and rough, like a cottonmouth moccasin that's just crawled out of the water. But there's no one and nothing back there that she can see, no one who might have spoken her name, so Dancy turns around and starts walking again.

It's what you don't see that's almost always the worst, her grandmother told her once. It's what you don't see will drag you down one day, if you ain't careful.

Dancy glances over her shoulder, and the angel is standing in the center of the highway, straddling the broken yellow dividing line. Its tattered muslin and silk robes are even blacker than the wet asphalt, and they flutter and flap in a fierce and holy wind that touches nothing else. The angel's four ebony wings are spread wide, and it holds a burning sword high above its four shimmering kaleidoscope faces, both skeletal hands gripped tightly around the weapon's silver hilt.

"I was starting to think maybe I'd lost you," Dancy says and turns to face the angel. She can hear the wind that swirls always about it, like hearing a freight train when you're only half way across a trestle and there's no way to get off the tracks before it catches up with you, nowhere to go unless you want to fall, and that sound drowns out or silences the noises coming from the woods at the edge of the road.

And there's another sound, too, a rumble like thunder, but she knows that it isn't thunder.

"If I went any slower," she replies, "I'd just about be standing still."

The thunder sound again, and the roar of the angel's scalding wind, and Dancy squints into the blinding light that's begun to leak from its eight sapphire eyes.

"No, angel," she says quietly. "I ain't forgot about you. I ain't forgotten about any of it."

The angel shrieks and swings its burning sword in a long, slow arc, leaving behind bits of fire and ember, ash and cinders, and now the air smells more like burning pitch and charred flesh than it smells like pine trees and summer rain and poisonous toadstools.

"Oh, I think you can probably keep up," she says, and turns her back on the Seraph.

And then there's only the dead, violated emptiness and the terrible silence that the angel always leaves behind when it goes. Very slowly, by hesitant degrees, all the murmuring forest noises return, and Dancy walks just a little faster than before; she's relieved when the high pines finally fall away on either side of the road and the land opens up, changing once more to farms and wild prairie. Pastures and cows, barbed-wire fences and a small service station maybe a hundred yards or so farther down the highway, and Dancy wishes she had the money for a Coke. A Coke would be good, syrupy sweet and ice cold and bubbling on her tongue. But at least they won't charge her to use the toilet, and she can wash up a little and piss without having to worry about squatting in poison oak.

She doesn't look back at the woods again, the trees standing straight and tall on either side of the highway. That part of her life is over, lived and past and done with, one small stretch of road she only needed to walk once, and, besides, she knows the angel won't come to her again for days.

After the rain and the Seraph's whirlwind, the afternoon is still and cool, and her boots seem very loud on the wet pavement. It only takes her a few more minutes to reach the service station, where an old man is sitting on a plastic milk crate beneath a corrugated tin awning. He waves to her, and Dancy waves back at him, then she tugs at the green canvas strap on her duffel bag because her shoulder's gone to sleep again.

There's a big plywood billboard beside the road, but it's not nearly so tall as the faded Texaco sign-that round placard dangling from a lamppost, a perfect black circle to contain its five-pointed red pentacle, that witch's symbol to keep out some great evil. Dancy already knows all about pentagrams, so she turns her attention to the billboard, instead; it reads live panther-deadly man eater in sloppy whitewash lettering.

She leaves the highway, skirting the edges of a wide orange-brown mud hole where the Texaco's parking lot and driveway begins, crunching across the white-grey limestone gravel strewn around the gasoline pumps. The old man is standing up now, digging about in a pocket of his overalls.

"How ya doin' there, sport?" he asks her, and his hand reappears with half a roll of wintergreen Certs.

"I'm fine," she says, not smiling because her shoulder hurts too much. "You got a bathroom I can use?"

"You go

"I don't have any money," she tells him.

"Hell," he says and sits back down on the plastic milk crate. "Well, I don't guess that makes no difference. The privy's right inside. But you better damn flush when you're done, you hear me? And don't you get piss on the seat."

Dancy nods her head, then stares at him until the old man leans back and blinks at her.

"You want somethin' else?"

"Do you really have a live panther?" she asks him, and the man arches both his eyebrows and grins, showing off his yellow-brown, tobacco-stained smile again.