Two Shades of Morning by Janice Daugharty

outside the window, and what Sibyl had said about me rubbing all over Punk strained with the sounds into my head. I felt cut off from P.W. by my secret. Why would she dare say something like that? Was she ignorant to what it meant? Did she think I’d forget it? No. She’d said it expecting me to overlook it because she was dying.
    Rubbing all over somebody was a common enough accusation among white trash. Rubbing all over a man, a woman got raped. Rubbing all over a black man, she got run out of town and he got hung from the nearest oak.
    Rubbing all over Punk: I can’t say that thought didn’t cross my mind, how bad it felt, how wrong, what it looked like. It did. I thought about it, just as Sibyl had, and I felt sick. But at the time I’d felt for broken bones and brushed dirt from his clothes without thinking—it was the human thing to do. I could still feel his skin, feverishly dry and impure, and I shuddered like I would if I’d touched a snake.
    #
    Sibyl’s next move came swiftly. As my cuckoo clock stroked off ten mechanical bleeps the next morning, she knocked on my door.
    P.W. had left me asleep, and I woke up addled by the mix of birdcalls and rapping. Something behind all the fuss lay heavy, like a wet quilt up to my eyes. Sunlight spread across my bed, with dust squiggles sifting from the shadowy white ceiling. Nothing had changed and yet everything had. I waited for the racket to stop, for good old common sense to take hold.
    P.W. had given me the cuckoo clock for a wedding present and I took turns hating and loving the dummy bird with its fake feathered head. It now burped a final dead cuckoo! as if it had given up trying to wake lazy me, but the rapping on the door still vibrated the whole house. You could walk across the floor and the windows shook.
    The haze in my head cleared, and images of yesterday zoomed into focus, every word Sibyl had said was like the tinkling of a bell. The whole scene with the horse played out in my head on my way to the door. I was new again, glowing with the fresh outlook mornings always brought. No flu, no wooliness. Punk was in his place, I was in mine. Safe in the afterjar of danger.
    “Just a minute!” I called, going back for one of P.W.’s shirts to slip over my nightie. I opened the door and stuck my head out to find Sibyl standing on the doorsteps, competing with the sun in a peach-colored outfit.
    “I thought I’d never wake you up,” she drawled, laughing and rubbing her knuckles. The veins on her hands were strutted and bluish.
    I clutched the door, started to slam it, but didn’t. What was left to say?
    “Listen,” she bagan, sliding her fingers into the pockets of her skinny peach pants. “I’m giving a little cookout for the young people from church tonight. What’cha call it...the BTU? And I need you to help out. I told Brother Travis we’d do it together. Seems like there’s nothing for young people to do around here but get in trouble, hanging around the cafe.”
    I could feel my face slide from sleep-fresh to fuzzy as she went on about what we had to do that day. So far, I could still credit myself with not having given in to her—I hadn’t said a word yet. But as she droned on, shifting on her spotless boots, I knew I was lost. She was as pure as the murmur of morning. It was like beholding a holy radiance and thinking of turning away when she said, “I don’t know if anybody told you yet, but I don’t have long to live.”
    She said it to explain, I supposed, as if dying was the most reasonable reason for anybody’s bad behavior. No apologies. She stood there in the promise of death, beautiful and sure, with those hunched shoulders her only flaw, her only clue to being as vulnerable as anybody else. “What time?” I asked, thinking of Easter because I’d just spied the first jonquil that had resurrected during the night.
    “We need to get started early. About two,” she said, her voice taking on that quality of authority which was