Yesterday I found a dump of jack-o’-lanterns in the ditch, the smashed faces of all the men I used to know. They grinned to show me the stones in their broken mouths. They’ve taken themselves apart. I’m looking for their unstuffed clothes, hoping they didn’t empty their pockets before their skulls flamed out.

It’s dark. Clare pulls me toward the gully. She wants me to run down between the black trees and twisting vines. She wants me to feel my way — she wants me to crawl.

Morning again, I saw a deer, only the head and legs, bits of hide, a smear of blood, five crows taking flight, wings hissing as they rose. Someone’s accident butchered here, the stunned meat taken home. Before you fell asleep, I said, Anyone can kill.

She’s in your sights. Nobody understands your fear, how you feel my hands even now, reaching for your wrists, slipping under your clothes. So many ways to do it, brutal or graceful, silent as the blood in my sister’s veins or full of shattered light and sound. Kick to the shoulder, blast of the gun — she staggers, wounded, not killed all at once. There’s snow on the ground, gold leaves going brown. There’s light in the last trembling leaves but the sun is gone. You follow her trail, dark puddles spreading in snow, black into white, her blood.

You remember a farmer straddling his own sheep. Will it be like this? The knife, one slit, precise. Pain is just a feeling like any other feeling. She never struggled. He reached inside, grabbed something, squeezed hard. I can’t tell you what it was.

She won’t drop in time, won’t give up. When you put your hands in front of you, you almost feel her there: hair, flesh, breath, blood. She wants only what you want: to survive one minute more.

What would you do if you found her now, if her ragged breathing stopped? Too far to drag her back to the truck; you’d have to open her in the sudden dark, pull her steaming entrails into the snow.

I wait for the next ride. Clare wants me to follow in her tracks, to find her before she falls, to touch her, to wash her blood clean in this snow, to put it back in her veins, to make her whole.

You walk in a circle. You wonder if you’re lost. The doe’s following you now, but at a distance. She’s trying to forgive you. If she could speak, she might tell you the way home. She might say, You can climb inside me, wear my body like a coat.

You can’t explain this to anyone. Never, no. You need me. I’m the only one alive who knows your fear, who understands how dangerous we are to each other in these woods, on this road.

2 XMAS, JAMAICA PLAIN

I’m your worst fear.

But not the worst thing that can happen.

I lived in your house half the night. I’m the broken window in your little boy’s bedroom. I’m the flooded tiles in the bathroom where the water flowed and flowed.

I’m the tattoo in the hollow of Emile’s pelvis, five butterflies spreading blue wings to rise out of his scar.

I’m dark hands slipping through all your pale woman underthings; dirty fingers fondling a strand of pearls, your throat, a white bird carved of stone. I’m the body you feel wearing your fox coat.

Clare said, Take the jewelry; it’s yours.

My heart’s in my hands: what I touch, I love; what I love, I own.

Snow that night and nobody seemed surprised, so I figured it must be winter. Later I remembered it was Christmas, or it had been, the day before. I was with Emile, who wanted to be Emilia. We’d started downtown, Boston. Now it was Jamaica Plain, three miles south. Home for the holidays, Emile said, some private joke. He’d been working the block around the Greyhound Station all night, wearing nothing but a white scarf and black turtleneck, tight jeans. Man wants to see before he buys, Emile said. He meant the ones in long cars, cruising, looking for fragile boys with female faces.

Emile was sixteen, he thought.

Getting old.

He’d made sixty-four dollars, three tricks with cash, plus some pills — a bonus for good work, blues and greens, he didn’t know what. Nobody’d offered to take him home, which is all he wanted: a warm bed, some sleep, eggs in the morning, the smell of butter, hunks of bread torn off the loaf.

Crashing, both of us, ragged from days of speed and crack, no substitute for the smooth high of pure cocaine but all we could afford. Now, enough cash between us at last. I had another twenty-five from the man who said he was in the circus once, who called himself the Jungle Creep — on top of me he made that sound. Before he unlocked the door, he said, Are you a real girl? I looked at his plates — New Jersey; that’s why he didn’t know the lines, didn’t know that the boys as girls stay away from the Zone unless they want their faces crushed. He wanted me to prove it first. Some bad luck once, I guess. I said, It’s fucking freezing. I’m real. Open the frigging door or go.

Now it was too late to score, too cold, nobody on the street but Emile and me, the wind, so we walked, we kept walking. I had a green parka, somebody else’s wallet in the pocket — I couldn’t remember who or where, the coat stolen weeks ago and still mine, a miracle out here. We shared, trading it off. I loved Emile. I mean, it hurt my skin to see his cold.

Emile had a plan. It had to be Jamaica Plain, home — enough hands as dark as mine, enough faces as brown as Emile’s — not like Brookline, where we’d have to turn ourselves inside out. Jamaica Plain, where there were pretty painted houses next to shacks, where the sound of bursting glass wouldn’t be that loud.

Listen, we needed to sleep, to eat, that’s all. So thirsty even my veins felt dry, flattened out. Hungry somewhere in my head, but my stomach shrunken to a knot so small I thought it might be gone. I remembered the man, maybe last week, before the snow, leaning against the statue of starved horses, twisted metal at the edge of the Common. He had a knife, long enough for gutting fish. Dressed in camouflage but not hiding. He stared at his thumb, licked it clean, and cut deep to watch the bright blood bubble out. He stuck it in his mouth to drink, hungry, and I swore I’d never get that low. But nights later I dreamed him beside me. Raw and dizzy, I woke, offering my whole hand, begging him to cut it off.

We walked around your block three times. We were patient now. Numb. No car up your drive and your porch light blazing, left to burn all night, we thought. Your house glowed, yellow even in the dark, paint so shiny it looked wet, and Emile said he lived somewhere like this once, when he was still a boy all the time, hair cropped short, before lipstick and mascara, when his cheeks weren’t blushed, before his mother caught him and his father locked him out.

In this house Emile found your red dress, your slippery stockings. He was happy, I swear.

So why did he end up on the floor?

I’m not going to tell you; I don’t know.

First, the rock wrapped in Emile’s scarf, glass splintering in the cold, and we climbed into the safe body of your house. Later we saw this was a child’s room, your only one. We found the tiny cowboy boots in the closet, black like Emile’s but small, so small. I tried the little bed. It was soft enough but too short. In every room your blue-eyed boy floated on the wall. Emile wanted to take him down. Emile said, He scares me. Emile said your little boy’s too pretty, his blond curls too long. Emile said, Some night the wrong person’s going to take him home.

Emile’s not saying anything now, but if you touched his mouth you’d know. Like a blind person reading lips, you’d feel everything he needed to tell.

We stood in the cold light of the open refrigerator, drinking milk from the carton, eating pecan pie with our hands, squirting whipped cream into our mouths. You don’t know how it hurt us to eat this way, our shriveled stomachs stretching; you don’t know why we couldn’t stop. We took the praline ice cream to your bed, one of those tiny containers, sweet and sickening, bits of candy frozen hard. We fell asleep and it melted, so we drank it, thick, with your brandy, watching bodies writhe on the TV, no sound: flames and ambulances all night; children leaping; a girl in mud under a car, eight men lifting; a skier crashing into a wall — we never knew who was saved and who was not. Talking heads spit the news again and again. There was no reason to listen — tomorrow exactly the same things would happen, and still everyone would forget.