It’s her again. The woman. She’s come back to me, this woman from my dreams, from my nightmares. Sometimes I think she’s just a part of me: my dark side, the place all my powers come from. She’s the one who gives me my visions, whatever knowledge I may have, I understand that. My spirit guide. She’s so familiar to me, with a face that isn’t my mother’s but has certain similarities. She has the same eyes as my mother but a longer face; same dark curly hair but kept long, not cut short like my mother’s. And this woman wears a necklace, a strange design with a circle, triangle, square, and circle, with an eye in the center. I’ve been dreaming of her since I was a little girl. Since before my mother was killed in the fire, before my father remarried and carted my brother, Mark, and me off to Springfield to start another life with his new wife, Margaret, whom we were made to call “Mother,” and soon our new flock of half siblings, all blond and blue-eyed and freckled like their mother. They pretended to love us for Father’s sake but were always slightly suspicious of our dark hair and eyes, of the tragedy we wore on our sleeves.

The woman from my dreams is speaking now, trying to tell me something, but I can’t hear the words. I lower my face closer to the bowl. I can smell the alkaline scent of the black dye. My breath is making the water ripple slightly, distorting her image.

The woman in the water speaks urgently, though without sound. Her eyes bore into mine. She’s got something in her hands, something I can’t make out at first; then the image clarifies, the object comes into view.

It’s a gun. A handgun. Small and silver, like the one Sam owns.

Sweet Melissa. That’s what he calls his gun. Silly, to name a gun and to name it something you might call a lover. It gives a strange power to the object, imbues the cold metal with warmth, with emotion.

Sam is out plowing the fields now, but he’ll be home by suppertime. If Miss Vera pays me well, we’ll have a nice roast tonight. No pasta primavera with Alfredo or Cajun rice and beans—giving a dish a fancy name doesn’t make it fill your belly more or disguise that it’s a cheap meal, that we couldn’t afford better.

No money for meat, but there’s always money for Sam’s bourbon. He sees to that.

He isn’t a bad man, Sam. Just a man who’s run out of luck. Out of choices. Last year, we sold off thirty acres to pay the back taxes. Now we’re underwater again.