Free The Well and the Mine by Gin Phillips

she stick out? Crazy or evil must look different than we thought.”
    “Who’s crazy?” asked Jack.
    “We’re just talkin’,” said Virgie. “Don’t pay us any mind.”
    “Who’s crazy?” he said again.
    “The woman who threw that baby in the well,” I said too sharp.
    “Oh,” he said, frowning. “I was only askin’.”
    “Well, don’t be such a Nosy Parker.” He was always trying to get in on everything.
    “I think you’re just as crazy as anybody,” he muttered.
    “What?” That boy wasn’t right in the head.
    “You still believe there’s mermaids and fairies and such.”
    “So?”
    “There’s no such thing. Don’t know about mermaids in the ocean, but you say fairies live in the woods. And they do not.”
    “Sure they do.”
    “Then why don’t we ever see them?”
    “Oh, quit it,” huffed Virgie. “You’re like two puppies yapping back and forth. Don’t pay her no mind, Jack. She’s just grumpy.”
    With a glare at me, he went back to waiting for Virgie to draw a new board. She did, smiling at him and cutting her eyes at me. It wasn’t fair that the littlest and cutest one always got to be right.
    “Still want to argue that you can tell crazy from not-crazy?” she asked, talking softly and hardly moving her lips. “Oh, that’s the whole thing, Tess.” She caught her lip with her teeth for a second. “We can’t tell crazy. We can’t tell anything. It’s not like she’s got big googly eyes that turn around in circles. We have to be smart to track her down.”
    “I didn’t say she has googly eyes.” That was stupid.
    “And if you’re not going to be serious about it, I’ll do it myself.”
    “I’m serious,” I insisted. Virgie didn’t say anything. “I am. I’m very, very serious. Serious as a funeral.”
    She looked mad.
    “I didn’t mean it like that,” I said.
    I didn’t. Sometimes you make a bad joke when you really don’t mean it, and my mouth could be too fast for my brain. “I’m very serious about it.”
    “That’s fine then. As long as we can be grown up about it.”
    “Yes,” I nodded quickly. “Just like we’re sheriffs.”
    She twisted around and took the list off my lap. “Oh, I didn’t think,” she said after she read over them. “These three had girls.” She crossed them off.
    “Why y’all namin’ names?” asked Jack, drawing curlicues around the edge of the paper while he waited for Virgie to make her move.
    “Oh, just ’cause,” Virgie said. “No one special.” She blocked his row of Xs and he forgot about it.
    “Virgie, how many people are in Carbon Hill?” I asked.
    She looked up, chewed her lip a minute. “Papa,” she called, “how many people in Carbon Hill?”
    “’Bout three thousand,” he called back.
    That worried me. “We don’t know all them three thousand.”
    She thought about that. “Well, she put him in our well. She must live around here, probably knows us.” She looked down at the list. “I think we ought to go check the babies.”
    “We gone knock on their doors and ask ’em to hand ’em out?”
    She scanned over the list. “Well, we ought to see some of ’em at church on Sunday. Then we’ll start on the others.”
    “And you’re doin’ this so the baby will be at peace?” I still wasn’t quite clear.
    She answered right away. “I just want to know if too much motherin’ and tendin’ and cleanin’ ends up pushin’ you to this.”

    Virgie IN OUR PRIMERS, “OUTSIDE” WAS LISTED AS A PREPOSITION. “Put the ball outside the box.” But here “Outside” was a thing you could touch. A noun.
    The woods started at the edge of the creek, and the sound of moving water blocked out the sound of birds until I got deep into the trees. Then the ground was speckled with shadows and leaves and sometimes sunshine, and my shoes made loud sounds that made me feel like I didn’t belong. But if I was still, I could be completely quiet, and I could sink into the woods, maybe lean against a