The Messenger of Magnolia Street by River Jordan Page B

you’d have to know about the warm place her hand had left on Nehemiah’s arm long after it was gone. What I can see is that Nehemiah can’t help but soften when he looks at it. He picks the picture up in his hand, studies the image, wipes the dust from the glass before he puts it down.
    He opens the closet door. It squeaks on the hinges. Billy is true to his word, not a thing has changed. There is the slightest smell of mothballs, placed there forever ago. Nehemiah runs his fingers down the arm of his old jacket. But then something on the closet shelf catches his eye.
    â€œHey,” he says aloud. “I’d forgotten all about this.”
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    Trice looks up from her reading and pulls her eyebrows together. She listens, but there is no sound except the wind and Magnus saying, “No, no, you are too fat already.” She knows this must be directed toward General, the gray tomcat with the yellow eyes. He’s a pushy one. She listens a little longer and puts her nose back in the book. She is up to Chapter 4.
    At this precise moment, between the written lines a solar eclipse is taking place. The world is falling into shadow and the people are perplexed. They do not understand the word orbit and are full of fear and trembling. They believe that something catastrophic is about to happen. And that following this event nothing will ever be the same.
    Friday, 9:28 A.M .
    It’s almost 9:30 when Nehemiah walks through the front door of Kate’s Diner. A few die-hard stragglers have been holding on, wanting to see the hornet’s nest in full fury, but they are forgetting something as Kate steps through the kitchen door. She looks up and fills her eyes with Twila’s boy. Not the one that had smelled—now how would she put that— good but foreign . Not the one with the manicured nails and all that slickness hanging about him like so much strange air. But the one that had just walked through her door. The one that was standing before her in his old, faded, threadbare jean jacket and blue jeans. And she thinks, By God, if he doesn’t even have his boots on.
    Her wrath spills from her shoulders until it is only a puddle at her feet. A puddle she easily steps over on her way to wrap some fleshy arms around the boy. And with that enormous hug, with Nehemiah’s head disappearing into the body parts of Kate Ann, the audience members shake their heads and start to count their change. Doggone if the show isn’t over before it had good begun.
    Kate pulls Nehemiah to a booth in the corner, one situated where other people can’t be tending to their business.
    â€œDid you eat?”
    Nehemiah says no, but he is looking at the clock. “You changed that clock out.”
    â€œWell, I reckon so, it’s been over ten years since you stepped foot in here.”
    â€œWrong. I was in here last night.”
    â€œHow ’bout some biscuits and gravy?”
    â€œSounds good.”
    â€œAnd some bacon, or a pork chop, would you rather have a pork chop? And I’ve got some…”
    Now he knows she is talking about food. See him nod. See him plaster on a smile, lock it into place. Nehemiah is no fool. Not by a long shot. He knows that clock hasn’t been moved since it was hung there. He now knows what he saw, what he heard last night, was either a delusional apparition or something much more interesting. He starts to look around with a heightened sensitivity.
    What’s going on? he wonders. His eyes are still fastened on the clock when Kate begins to deliver a breakfast of sausage links and grits, scrambled eggs, fried potatoes on the side, biscuits and gravy, and homemade blackberry jelly saved from two years ago.
    â€œWe didn’t get enough rain last year to count for nothin’. Blackberries dried up on the vine.”
    â€œAunt Kate, is anything strange going on around here?” Nehemiah doesn’t call her Aunt unless he’s serious. And