Between the Spark and the Burn by April Genevieve Tucholke Page A

“Some people are saying he’s the devil and has hooves for feet and fire coming out of his fingertips, but it’s wrong. It’s all wrong. He . . . he just looks like a boy, just a boy like either of you.” She stopped and stared at Neely, and then at Luke. “I saw him when he came to me, in my bedroom. He sat on my stomach, light as air, and tried to steal my dreams, only I woke up. The other girls, they didn’t wake up in time, they didn’t see his face in the dark, but I struck a match. I saw.”
    Neely flinched when the girl said
a boy, just a boy like either of you.
    The girl started blinking fast, and her eyes were pleading and wistful and kind of lonely. That look was familiar to me, in some deep, almost forgotten way.
    â€œI didn’t tell anyone,” she said. “The other girls told, but I didn’t.”
    I wanted to ask her more, and so did Neely, behind me. His mouth was parted and I could almost see his questions, sitting on the edge of his tongue . . .
    But I felt so bad for her suddenly, with her red-rimmed eyes and her skinny shoulders all hunched up and the blood on her dress. I didn’t care about anything, right then. Not the devil-boy, not the dead birds, not Brodie. There was just this girl.
    I pulled myself away from Luke, and stepped forward. “Let’s go to the cemetery and get this done, okay?” I nodded at the bowl, and then I reached for her free hand. It was small and calloused, like the boy who gave us directions. I took it in mine, and squeezed.
    We all walked back down the road, past all the white houses with the tight black shutters and the dead birds on the doors, to the church. I opened the black iron gate, careful not to touch the birds, not to look into their black eyes, and pulled the girl in behind me.
    â€œMy name is Pine,” she said as we climbed up to the tiny cemetery off to the left of the church. “Like the trees. My mother likes the way they smell. And how they never die, even in winter.”
    â€œI’m Violet,” I said. “And that’s Luke, my twin brother, and our next-door neighbor Sunshine, and our friend Neely.”
    She looked at them in turn, and nodded. The cemetery was on a small hill, the gravestones leaning and crouching and huddled together. I glanced down the horizon. From up here the mountains seemed to be nestling the whole town in the crook of its arm.
    Pine stepped up to the nearest gravestone, the sky behind her a dusky blue, edged in a scorching red-orange. She lifted the bowl and poured about a quarter cup of the blood right over the top.
“And thou shalt slay the swine, and thou shalt take its blood, and sprinkle it on the stones,”
she said, soft and slow, like a prayer.
    It was getting dark, fast, but I could still see the stains of previous offerings, turning the worn, crooked stone an unsettling color, flaking off onto the ground like shavings of rust.
    â€œWhy do you do this?” I asked, moving with her over to the next stone, a tall one. I helped her lift the lip of the bowl and dribble the blood over the letters, GRIEVE , until they were coated. There were no other words carved on it, just Grieve.
    She shrugged again, a tight moving up and down of her shoulders. “Because we always have. Whenever someone has a baby that’s sick, or an Elderly that needs to move on, or a kid gone missing in the woods, we make a blood offering to our ancestors.”
    We moved on down the line. Neely and Luke and Sunshine stood about fifteen yards away, watching from the edge of the cemetery at the base of the hill, not talking. Both Luke and Sunshine clutched the iron gate in their fists, like they couldn’t wait to leave.
    Three days ago we were singing Christmas songs in Citizen Kane, and now I was helping a sad girl in a dead-bird town pour blood in a churchyard. Life was . . . strange.
    It was the last headstone, number nineteen,