Free The Messenger of Magnolia Street by River Jordan Page A

here.”
    Oh, just look at those righteous ruffled feathers. A man holding doing the right thing out before him like a martyr’s trophy.
    â€œLook, excuse me if I get a kick out of the possibility, just the slight possibility, that I’m not the only one swimming in the river of strange.”
    Nehemiah raises his brows. “Did I just say that?”
    â€œWhat?” This comes from Billy and Trice both.
    â€œThe river of strange, did I just say that aloud?”
    â€œAll right, Nehemiah, let’s start with the clock then.” Billy is trying to corral their words. “Let’s talk about the clock, because I wasn’t really gonna bring it up. I guess you figured out that there ain’t no chiming clock in the diner. Never has been.”
    I wish I could tell you that they were making sense. That they were finally getting somewhere. That the clock I always hear was on their side, in their favor. But they are struggling so hard to make sense of things that they are missing the things that make sense. They are looking in the hard-to-reach places when they should be looking at what’s right before them. Right before them at the center of the table. Right where it’s always been. But they don’t see it.
    Nehemiah tries to build logical bricks, tries his very best to lay the skills of Washington, the skills he has worked so long to perfect, on the table. To dissect the problem and develop a program, a plan to get to the other side. He is still trying to do this when Billy gets up and rummages through the refrigerator. (His stomach is always the first to growl.) He pulls bologna, mayonnaise, cheesefrom the refrigerator and puts a loaf of white bread on the table. It’s a self-serve dinner. Trice picks up potato chips from the kitchen counter, opens them, and walks around with her hand inside the bag. Before the night is over, she will eat them all. Nehemiah will eat nothing.
    Billy wants to voice that he’s just along for the ride, but what he really wants to say is that he sure is concerned about his brother acting peculiar. He is used to the peculiar antics of Trice. Everything from a cat sleeping on the motor and her knowing it before the car cranks to showing up saying, we got to drive over to Troy and pick up somebody from the bus station right now . Never mind what he was fixin’ to do. Never mind that she doesn’t know who or why or what for. But off he goes to satisfy her every whim, again, and lo and behold if Joshua Johnson wasn’t standing there fresh out of boot camp and ready to surprise his momma but had forgotten all about how he was gonna get from the bus station in Troy to Shibboleth except to walk it out. (Boot camp had done him some good but in some ways he was still the same old Joshua. Nothing another decade wouldn’t fix.) Billy had just looked at Trice (who never rubbed it in when she was right) and shook his head and said, “Hey, boy, you looking for a ride home?”
    So all the antics of Trice were buried under his skin until they had become, well, just about normal for her . But with Nehemiah, well there was just that one great episode (and even now he can see Nehemiah walking through the flames carrying Blister in his arms). But besides that time, Nehemiah had been as normal as a life can seem to be. He is beginning to wonder if bringing Nehemiah down here was such a good idea.
    â€œAbout this awakening,” Billy waves a sandwich, his cheese falling out of the edges of the bread, “stop crunching, Trice, and just tell it.”
    â€œAlready told it.” She glares at him as she shoves more chips into her mouth.
    â€œWell, tell it again .”
    Trice tries to recapture the pictures and to put words to the images of what she sees. “Black wings,” she says. And the word dark ness . And it occurs to her to use the word eclipse . It occurs to her strongly that this is the right word. The word she has