A Clatter of Jars by Lisa Graff

pocket watch.
For my two beloved granddaughters,
she’d written.
So they each may know a Talent.
The harmonica and the pocket watch were Grandma Esther’s two most precious possessions, from a lifetime of collecting. Everyone knew that. But no one understood what they truly were until Jo put the harmonica to her lips.
    Gold and tangerine and walnut and sunshine. Those were the colors Jo saw when she played the harmonica. And she was playing for
Jenny
.
    â€œYou’re Talented,” Jo had told her sister, pulling the harmonica—an
Artifact
—from her mouth. “Jenny, you’re very, very Talented.” Jennifer Mallory, it turned out, had a Talent for matching orphans with the perfect adoptive parents. As soon as Jo had seen the colors, she’d known.
    And she’d known, almost immediately after, that she herself had no Talent at all. Not without the harmonica.
    â€œWind the pocket watch,” Jo had urged Jenny. In order to reap the benefits of an Artifact, a person needed to use it, but even without winding its gears, Jo had seen the colors swirling around the watch when she played—chartreuse and fern, sea foam and pickle. It was a gorgeous Talent, mesmerizing. A Talent for singing.
    But Jenny merely held the watch in her hand, studying its gears beneath the glass. “Maybe it’s best to stick with the Talents we’re born with,” she’d replied—which, Jo would later decide, was easy enough to say when you’d been born with
something
. And then Jenny had snapped the watch shut.
    Jo did not shut away her harmonica. She played it for nearly everyone she met. She played it for Juan—who, she discovered, was completely Fair, just as she was. But unlike Jo, he didn’t seem to mind so much. He had Jenny, he said, and that was enough. Asking for more would be greedy.
    As the wedding drew nearer, Jenny and Juan made more plans for their future. Once they were married, it was decided, they would open an orphanage—Jenny and Juan’s Home for Lost Children. Jenny would match orphans with their lucky parents, and Juan would run the place, tending the garden, fixing broken steps. For the first time, Jo realized, their plans did not include her. She watched the calendar, her stomach twisting inside her, as the date she would lose her sister loomed ever nearer.
    So Jo, thirteen and fearing the future, began a campaign to stop it from coming.
    â€œDo you ever worry . . . ?” she’d said to Juan one night, when they were sipping blackberry iced tea on the porch swing. Jenny was inside being fitted for her wedding dress. “Do you ever worry that Jenny might get . . . ?” Jo trailed off, darting her eyes to her lap, as though consumed by words unsaid.
    â€œMight get what?” Juan asked, taking a sip of his tea.
    â€œMight get . . . bored,” Jo finished, her voice thick with hesitation. “I mean, because she has such an incredible Talent, and you . . . It’s just that, since she’s
so
Talented, maybe she’d want . . .” She let her gaze drift to the thick of the woods. “You don’t ever feel bad without a Talent?”
    â€œOh, Joley.” Juan slugged Jo in the shoulder, the way a big brother slugs a little sister. “I don’t need Talent to be happy.” He took another long sip of his tea. And then, just when Jo’s heart had begun to sink, he looked up. “Did Jenny say something to you?” he asked.
    â€œHmm?” Jo shook her head quickly. Too quickly. “Oh. Oh, no. She didn’t say anything. I promise. I was just thinking.”
    But she could tell that a thought had wiggled its way into Juan’s brain. And when thoughts wiggle their way in, sometimes it can be very difficult for them to wiggle out again. Sometimes, after months of wiggling, after a dozen more similar thoughts, if a little sister happened to leave