’d run, terrified, along the hobo paths, over the trestle, and through the streets. Kids said she was a witch capable of witch deeds, unspeakable boilings and tearings apart and transformations if she caught us. “She’ll touch you on the shoulder, and you’ll not be you anymore. You’d be a piece of glass winking and blinking to people on the sidewalk.” She came riding to the slough with a broom between her legs, and she had powdered one cheek red and one white. Her hair stood up and out to the sides in dry masses, black even though she was old. She wore a pointed hat and layers of capes, shawls, sweaters buttoned at the throat like capes, the sleeves flying behind like sausage skins. She came to the slough not to harvest the useful herbs and berries the way we did, but to collect armfuls of cattails and tall grasses and tuber flowers. Sometimes she carried her broomstick horse like a staff. In the fall (she would be such a sight in the fall) she ran “faster than a swallow,” her cattails popping seed, white seed puffs blowing after her, clouds of fairies dancing over her head. She streamed color and flapped in layers. She was an angry witch, not a happy one. She was fierce; not a fairy, after all, but a demon. She did run fast, as fast as a child, although she was a wrinkled woman, an outburst that jumped at us from bushes, between cars, between buildings. We children vowed that we would never run home if she came after one of us. No matter what she did to us, we had to run in the opposite direction from home. We didn’t want her to know where we lived. If we couldn’t outrun her and lose her, we’d die alone. Once she spotted my sister in our yard, opened the gate, and chased her up the stairs. My sister screamed and cried, banging on the door. Our mother let her in quickly, looking frightened as she fumbled at the latches to lock out Pee-A-Nah. My sister had to be chanted out of her screaming. It was a good thing Pee-A-Nah had a short memory because she did not find our house again. Sometimes when a bunch of tules and reeds and grasses mixed and blew and waved, I was terrified that it was she, that she was carrying them or parting them. One day we realized that we had not seen her for a while. We forgot her, never seeing her again. She had probably been locked up in the crazyhouse too.
I had invented a quill pen out of a peacock feather, but stopped writing with it when I saw that it waved like a one-eyed slough plant.
I thought every house had to have its crazy woman or crazy girl, every village its idiot. Who would be It at our house? Probably me. My sister did not start talking among nonfamily until a year after I started, but she was neat while I was messy, my hair tangled and dusty. My dirty hands broke things. Also I had had the mysterious illness. And there were adventurous people inside my head to whom I talked. With them I was frivolous and violent, orphaned. I was white and had red hair, and I rode a white horse. Once when I realized how often I went away to see these free movies, I asked my sister, just checking to see if hearing voices in motors and seeing cowboy movies on blank walls was normal, I asked, “Uh,” trying to be casual, “do you talk to people that aren’t real inside your mind?”
“Do I what?” she said.
“Never mind,” I said fast. “Never mind. Nothing.”
My sister, my almost-twin, the person most like me in all the world, had said, “What?”
I had vampire nightmares; every night the fangs grew longer, and my angel wings turned pointed and black. I hunted humans down in the long woods and shadowed them with my blackness. Tears dripped from my eyes, but blood dripped from my fangs, blood of the people I was supposed to love.
I did not want to be our crazy one. Quite often the big loud women came shouting into the house, “Now when you sell this one, I’d like to buy her to be my maid.” Then they laughed. They always said that about my sister, not me because I dropped dishes at them. I picked my nose while I was cooking and serving. My clothes were wrinkled even though we owned a laundry. Indeed I was getting