The End of the Sentence by Maria Dahvana Headley, Kat Howard Page A

something other than the thing he seemed to be. That never went well in the world. I worried. But he was still so little.
    The last thing Row said to me was “I’m a princess, Daddy.” 
    And I thought, “There’s no such thing as that happy ending.”
    I tucked him in, and went downstairs to fight with his mother, our traditional fight about money, lasting until we were both too tired to stop ourselves from saying the worst possible things.
    I shut my eyes and rubbed my fists over them. A flash of satin. A cheap gilded crown with rhinestones all over it. Headlight, I thought. The kind of headlight you might not have bothered to get replaced, thinking you knew your way home on faith in the dark. 
    My coffee was full again. It was dawn, and I could see the sun rising out the windows. 
    I thought about iron shoes. Only sinners wore iron shoes. 
    The flap on the front door clicked open, but no letter fell through it. It set up a tremendous rattling, as if a tornado twisted on the other side of the door. The letters on the end table and in the woven basket flew into the air, and set up a whirlwind of their own, spinning and whiting out my vision.
    “What the hell is going on?” I yelled. The letters dropped to the ground. The mail flap held still.
    A knock on the door.
    Lischen March stood on the dirt path, a plate covered by a red gingham cloth in her hands. “Good morning! I thought you might be feeling a little rough, so I brought breakfast. Well, they’re popovers, so good anytime, really. Sorry it’s so early, but I saw the light on.”
    The hot, eggy scent of the popovers curled into my doorway. People had brought food, when Row died. Casseroles in heavy dishes and containers of soup, frozen, “for later.” They stop bringing the food when they realize the death is your fault. I felt nauseous.
    I stepped back out of the doorway. “Thanks. Um. Come in.”
    The letters were stacked, neatly, in the woven basket, under the table, and mostly out of sight. The sledgehammer was nowhere to be seen. Lischen looked around.
    “How bad was the place when you moved in?” she asked.
    “About what you’d expect, I guess,” I said. I poked my head into the refrigerator, looking for the pot of strawberry preserves, but the shelves were bare.
    “I don’t have much besides coffee to offer you,” I said.
    “Coffee’d be great,” she said. “Ralph said there was all sorts of scary graffiti on the walls.” She tilted her head and looked at me. “People always want to say stuff like that is done by Satanists, but I don’t think there are too many devil worshippers hanging out in Ione.” She laughed. 
    “It wasn’t good,” I said, “but it wasn’t like that either. It’s gone now. I painted over it.”
    “You should’ve shown me. I’m a librarian—I like interesting things.”
    Faces, pressing out from a wall. Handless arms reaching. No. 
    The light glinted against her left wrist as she reached for the mug. A cuff of two hands tightly linked together in shining white metal. “That’s a pretty bracelet.”
    “Thank you. I do some metal working, as a hobby,” she said, and smiled.
    A forge and a furnace and a hand hanging over a horn. I felt a sudden flood of relief. Maybe she was the one the letter meant, not me at all, maybe this was HER—
    “Like a blacksmith?” I asked.
    “Why, do you have a horse out back that needs shoeing?” She laughed. 
    Nothing like a horse, but oh, yes. Shoes were required. “Wouldn’t that be something if I did.”
    Lischen set the mug back down on the table, next to a letter from the prison. I felt an urge to tug it out of her way, but she put her hand on it before I could. 
    “Is this one of the ones you’ve been getting?” she asked.
    “Yeah,” I said, feeling exposed. A fraud, somehow. I suddenly thought I might have written them myself. 
    Approved , said the letter. Red ink. The same as always. The house said nothing, and nothing moved but the two of