I waited til they carried her body down the hall, then I sliced open her feather pillow with the kitchen shears to see where her spirit went.

I was alone with Memaw when she made a throat sound like the cattails blowing in the winter air, then her mouth hung wide as a kitchen drawer. I shouted for Aunt Lureen, and she tried to close it, but it stuck open, like the potato masher was caught between her tongue and dentures.

“Of course she’d make it ugly,” she said.

“Is Memaw in heaven with my mama now?”

“Lord knows.” Aunt Lureen sighed and hurried out of the room. Baby Bobby squalled from somewhere in the house, his screwed-up raisin face probably all purple. Always was.

It was Pan Creek Attic Cancer, Memaw told me. The Lumps. She said she’d be working hard on dying by the time the first frost came. I looked out the window and there was a fresh dust of snow on the mountain laurels. She said she was a lot of things, but she wasn’t no liar. I asked her if she was going to heaven, and she told me I’d have to wait and see. She’d broken every single commandment but one and enjoyed every minute of it, so her guess was as good as mine.

“But,” she leaned over to her bedstand and pulled open the drawer, “there’s only one way for the living to know where us sinners go when we die.”

She took out a wooden box with an angel painted on the top.

“I oughta be giving this to you when you’re older, but there’s no time for that now. This is from your mama’s pillow when she passed.”

Mama had the Lumps, too. I held the box in my hands. It felt lighter than I expected.

“Open it.” Memaw’s eyes were hard to look at. The whites had turned yellow as egg yolks.

Inside was a ball of goose feathers big as my fist. They wound around in a smooth knot, the feathers laying swirled together like a cinnamon roll. All the quills tucked deep in the center. I picked it up and it felt like I touched the cattle fence.

“Oh!” I dropped it back in the box.

“See?” Memaw’s cracked lips pulled wide.

“How’d you make that?”

“I didn’t make it, the angels did. Found it in your mama’s pillow. Means she was bound for glory.”

“What’s it called?” I gave the box back to her, not wanting to get zapped again. 

“It’s got lots of names, but I call it an angel crown. See how all the feathers swirl in toward the center?”

I nodded.

“That’s how you know they’re going to God.”

“Aunt Lureen said my mama didn’t see a sin she didn’t try more than once. She says sinners go to hell.”

“Lureen is a Lump.”

I giggled, then we both felt bad. I could tell Memaw felt the same, the way she shoved the box back in the drawer and shut it. Aunt Lureen took care of us both when nobody else wanted us. Her husband’s dead sister’s kid and a dying mother-in-law. We knew what we were, and that was what made us the same.

“If you get nervy after I’m gone, just cut my pillow open and see where I went,” Memaw said.

I must’ve looked real sad, because she grabbed my hand. “I’ll stick around if I can.”

The pillow was flat and stiff, a yellow circle in the center where Memaw’s head sat for the last two months. She was on Hoss Piss, Aunt Lureen said. Maybe that’s what made the pillow yellow. I pulled the case off and snipped along the edge of the pillow with the kitchen shears.

I dug my hand inside. Dying smelled mostly like old pee diapers, but the goose feathers smelled like living stuff like Uncle Rob’s armpits and wet dog. The feather quills prickled my knuckles til I found a round lump in the center and pulled it out.

It didn’t shock me like mama’s angel crown. It made me feel something else, something sick in my tummy, like I needed to hurl into the popcorn bowl.

Every soft feather tip was buried deep inside the knot, with every sharp quill swirling around the edge. They stretched and twitched, and I heard something like a voice. I put it close to my ear.

“Sweets?” I heard.

“I’m here, Memaw.”

“Sweets?” Uncle Rob opened the door.

I hid the kitchen shears and the angel crown behind my back.

His eyes were pink. A beer trembled in one hand, a cigarette in the other. “You alright?”

“I’m okay.”

“You shouldn’t be in here.” He glanced around the room and took a long drag. “You should go play outside or something.”

It was night and cold as a mother out there. “I’m fine,” I said. 

“Good,” he took a sip of beer and folded his arms. “Good.” His knees bent and he nearly dropped his smoke.

“Are you okay?”

“You’re too young to ask that.” His cheeks scrunched up to his eyebrows and from somewhere in the house, Baby Bobby screamed, and Aunt Lureen banged a pan on the stovetop. He breathed smoke out of his nose and stared at me like he was seeing me for the first time.

“Your mama died,” I said. “She was my Memaw, but she was your mama first. We are the same now. Both got mamas in heaven.”

“Everyone I ever loved is dead, and none of them loved me back.” He swayed from the door and staggered down the hall back to his family.

He was kind of a Lump, too, I realized for the first time.

“You left me with a bunch of Lumps.” I pulled the angel crown from behind my back. “Did you hear that?”

The quills shivered but didn’t talk back. I felt like throwing it on the floor and stomping it. But I didn’t. I set it beside me on the bed and wormed under the blanket.

My breath was frost in the morning as Baby Bobby screamed, Uncle Rob cussed, and Aunt Lureen stomped down the hall. I thought I had dreamed hearing Memaw’s voice til the feathers beside me whispered.

“Wake up, Sweets.”

My arm was covered in scratch marks like the barn kittens had gotten in again. I looked under the bed, but there was no cats.

“I haven’t left you,” the angel crown rattled. Some of the quill tips were red and wet.

🩸

The organ tooted out some dusty noises while we shuffled into the church. My duct-taped snow boots left clumps of dirty snow on the faded red carpet. Once we got seated in the front pew, Aunt Lureen tried to tug off my coat, but I shook my head til she sighed and quit hassling me. Baby Bobby started squalling, and Uncle Rob stared up at Memaw’s coffin like he couldn’t hear it. I wondered what he would say if I told him I had Memaw in my pocket.

I plucked at his arm and loud-whispered about needing to pee real bad. He didn’t say nothing, so I scooted off the pew and ran to the back of the church. Joy Powell elbowed her sister Hannah-Grace and smirked at my boots. I shuffled faster across the red carpet and hoped they wouldn’t follow me. It wasn’t my fault Memaw went and died, so now they had to go to service on a Saturday. Five church ladies were already in line for the one potty bathroom, so I pushed out the front door into the lip-chapping cold.

My breath puffed in my eyes like little haints and a mash-snow was falling, the kind that comes down in wet chunks and sticks to everything. I slipped through the creaking metal gate into the cemetery. There was a big new hole smack dab in the middle. I stood at the edge and kicked a clod of yellow clay into it. It fell to the bottom and scattered over the fresh snow lining the dirt.

I headed towards the back to a waist-high headstone where I’d gone before when the bathroom had a line. I hiked down my pants and leaned against the cold wet stone, then I got weird about Memaw being in my pocket. Felt disrespectful to make her listen to me piss. The quills pricked my fingers as I tugged her out and set her on top of the headstone.

I squatted, peering down to watch the yellow stream melt a snake hole into the white snow. Stinky Ed, the neighbor kid, could spell out his name, but he had a pecker and a two-letter name, which wasn’t fair in a pissing contest.

Right when I had squeezed the last dribble out and was wiping with a clump of snow, a hymnal hit me upside the head. I toppled, bare-butt out, onto my face. My nose stung and tears sprung in my eyes without me wanting them to.

“Your grandma went to hell.”

I swiped snow out of my eyes and looked up at Joy. She glared down at me.

“Did you hear me? Your grandma–”

“Quit being ugly.” Hannah-Grace tugged on her sister’s arm. “Can’t you just let her be?”

“If it weren’t for her grandma being dead, I’d be at Ashleigh’s birthday party like everyone else.”

I grabbed the sides of my pants and tried to hike them up. Snow had gotten into the waistband and burned my belly as I stood up. “My Memaw’s not in hell. She’s right here.” I picked up the angel crown and cradled it in my palms so it wouldn’t sting me.

Hannah-Grace’s mouth and eyes made O shapes.

Joy snorted. “You’re a nutcase.” Her eyes narrowed into mean slits. “I’ll bet you weren’t even invited to Ashleigh’s party.”

“Yeah, I was, same as you.”

I wasn’t.

“Nothing is the same about you and me,” she said and snatched the angel crown out of my hands, “cause you’re Devil-bit.” The quills shot out and stung into her palm as she shrieked and tried to shake it off.

“You gotta be gentle!” I tried to grab it back, but she dropped Memaw into the snow and before I could bend down, she smashed her with her shiny red boots. I slapped her.

“I’m telling on you,” she wailed and ran around gravestones toward the gate.

I bolted after her, my cheeks so hot they melted snowflakes before they even hit my skin. I caught up to her right before she reached the center of the cemetery and shoved her hard.

She disappeared.

Thump.

All was quiet for a moment. Just my breath wraithing in front of my eyes and salty tears stinging my chapped lips.

A long, gasping wail.

Joy was laying belly down in the grave they dug for Memaw’s body, her leg twisted and toes pointed up at the sky. She moved her arms like a snow angel, screaming bloody murder. Faces peered out the church windows. Hannah-Grace tottered up beside me, blubbering and flapping her mittened hands.

I yanked her arm. “She tripped.”

“I–I didn’t see,” she cried harder, snot bubbling from her nose.

“I saw her slip,” I said. “You saw her slip, too.”

“She pushed me,” Joy hollered from the grave.

Voices were shouting from the church doors, so I ran back to where Memaw’s angel crown was busted up and ground into the dirty snow. I dropped to my knees and picked out every sopping feather and tucked them into my pocket before rough hands grabbed my shoulders and jerked me onto my feet.

🩸

“You set and stew on what you’ve done,” Aunt Lureen said through the bedroom door as she clicked the lock.

I kicked off my boots and let them leave puddles on the braided rug. The feathers were all limp and soggy as I pulled them out of my pocket. I balled them up and stuck them under my pillow. Memaw’s spirit was with her body now, ground down in the cemetery snow and ice. I was really all alone.

I sat in the middle of the bed and stared out the window. Snow howled through the dark outside. Maybe I was Devil-bit, like Joy said. That’s why nobody would sit next to me unless the teacher told them to.

My cheek still stung from where Aunt Lureen slapped me silly. Uncle Rob wouldn’t look at me. Baby Bobby scrunched up his face and belted out one continuous scream all the way home. Bet it felt good to yell like that.

They took Joy out on a stretcher once the ambulance came. Her mama fainted when she saw how Joy’s foot was turned clean around, like it would walk backwards. After that, they dropped Memaw’s body box into the hole. Someone started a hymn, but nobody sang it right. They were all too busy gawking at me, so I looked down at my boots and watched the snow stick to them til all the silver duct tape was powdery white.

Joy got what was coming to her.

🩸

My empty stomach growled so loud it woke me up as the first light glowed blue through the window and the mean old rooster crowed from the barn. I could see my breath rise wet and white, my lips like the spout of a whistling kettle. Under my bruised cheek, I felt something move under my pillow.

“Sweets, you’re smashing me,” a rattling voice came.

I ripped the pillow away and there she was again. Some of her quills were bent and crooked, but she had balled herself back up into an angel crown again.

“I thought you were a goner.”

“I would never leave you all alone, Sweets.”

“Everyone’s mad at me cause I broke Joy’s leg.”

“That Joy Lump got what was coming to her.” The quills spiked out and tapped their tips together like tiny hands clapping.

“Yeah, she did.”

“But I am so hungry now. Putting myself back together sucked me dry.”

The quills drooped, and one of the feathers popped out and floated to the floor. I picked it up and pushed it back into the angel crown.

“I can give you some of my supper.”

A baked potato sat cold on the bedstand.

“No, no, I need something with toes. Something like those.”

The quills pointed towards the windowsill. Two stinkbugs ambled nowhere in particular. I pinched them both and brought them to the bed.

“Where do they go? I mean, where’s your mouth?”

“Right here.”

The quills rustled in the center and then pulled back. A little red hole pulsated, and rows of tiny white teeth like cat fangs sprang out from the slick tunnel. I dropped the first stink bug in, then the second, and the mouth twisted and crunched, swallowing them. The quills rustled again and covered the hole. Memaw perked up after that, cackling when I told her about Joy getting trundled off in the ambulance.

🩸

Every morning after that, I caught little things for her. More stinkbugs, a couple of wolf spiders that came in with the firewood, and silverfish that got stuck in the bathtub. I pawed through the snow and dug into the frozen garden to find earthworms, but they had tunneled too deep. I was running out of bugs. I pinched off some pink ground beef from the fridge, but she just spat it out and wailed like I was trying to feed her doo-doo from Baby Bobby’s diaper.

“I’ve run out of bugs.” I told her one morning. Her quills were all droopy, and a dozen of them had fallen out in the night. “There anything else you can eat?”

“Gizzards and toes.”

“Gizzards and toes?” I wrinkled my nose.

“Aren’t you sick of that gee-damn rooster waking us up too early?”

I wrung the rooster’s neck til it snapped, then cut it open with the kitchen shears. I knew what a gizzard looked like from when Aunt Lureen cooked a roast, so it wasn’t hard to find. After, I snipped off its toes for good measure. I used a branch to cover up my footprints to the barn, then chucked the rest of the rooster in the creek.

Memaw’s quills glowed and stood straight up in the air after I pushed the bloody bits down into her mouth hole. She slurped the gizzard and crunched the scaly knuckle bones and smacked her feathery lips.

“Mmm. Now that’s a meal,” she said. “I am feeling stronger now. Thank you, my Sweets. I couldn’t survive without you.”

I kept her in my coat pocket when I went to school. I never took it off, even in gym class, even though sweat soaked my clothes underneath. One day while we were playing kickball, I cornered Stinky Ed and asked him if there was another spot besides heaven or hell where dead souls go. He’d been to four other states already, so he knew more about other places. He said his cousin was a Catalytic and they had a third place called the Pig-A-Tarry. I asked Memaw if she was in the Pig-A-Tarry, and she said she was right there in my pocket and to quit asking nonsense questions.

Joy wasn’t coming back to school for the rest of the year on account of her leg. No one teased me or poked me anymore. The teachers didn’t try to make anyone sit beside me. With Memaw in my pocket, no one could get at me.

🩸

A week later, at supper, Aunt Lureen plunked a plate of boiled potatoes in front of me and asked, “You seen a fox or bobcat running through the yard lately?”

“Nope.”

“Cause the rooster’s gone, and there was at least three cats and a couple litters of kittens out in the barn, but they’ve all gone missing.”

“Maybe I saw a fox about a week ago.”

“Huh.” Aunt Lureen stared real hard at me, so I wolfed down chunks of potatoes as fast as I could swallow.

“Can I be excused?”

“Yeah, but stay in the room.”

As I went down the hall, I heard her holler for Uncle Rob. I stopped and crept back to listen.

“I’ve just about had it,” she said. “She’s got to go somewhere else.”

“Aw, she’s just a kid. I got into plenty of trouble when I was her age.”

“I mean it. I’m not having her in this house anymore. She’s Devil-bit. Gotta think about the baby now.”

I didn’t have to listen to no more. Uncle Rob would fuss some, but he always did whatever Aunt Lureen said. She slapped hotter than a firecracker.

I creeped under the covers and whispered through my sniffles, “They’re gonna send us away on account of the barn cats.”

But Memaw didn’t answer. I pulled her out from under my pillow. Just a mess of lopsided feathers, all the quills limp and splayed.

“You hungry? What else can I give you?”

I tried to gather the feathers back together. A small gasp and Memaw’s voice rattled in my ear, telling me what tiny things she needed to eat.

I waited with the kitchen shears under my covers, til the house was silent except for the chugging snores coming from the big bedroom. I snuck down the hall, carefully stepping over the boards that creaked, and waited at the door til I was sure I could hear both of them snoring.

A deeper, beer-soaked snore. A softer, whistly one.

Baby Bobby lay in his bassinette on Aunt Lureen’s side of the bed. I gently pulled back the blanket so I could make out his ten little pink toes all in two rows. I held my breath. He punched his tiny arms in the air and opened his mouth to let out an ear-piercing shriek just as I snipped.