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I reer Uda And I re out h while she wove strips of piecrust, pale and thin as flayed skin, over and under toa flash flood of ht drown in thees it hurt

"He raised you to be good girls," she said again She reached over and squeezedthe shoe to its box

I didn’t knohat to tell her ere looking for, for the historical project-anything docuenerally, old photographs of any kind Uda seeroundlabels: "CROCKERY AND FLATWARE" "GARDEN RECORDS" One bore the mystic title "ELECTRICITY" I looked inside: socket hardware, laloves

I couldn’t resist getting sidetracked by one marked, "ARTWORK, H, AGE 3-6" The subjects of Hallie’s crayon drawings werehands, or else justfroure anywhere representing Doc Homer I wondered if he’d noticed But he , rescued it from destruction, and finally labeled the box The invisible archivist of our lives

Out of curiosity I tracked down the corresponding box called "ARTWORK, C" As I’d expected, it was full of fa sister, little sister, father, mother, a cockeyed roof over our heads and above that an omnipresent yellow sun It didn’t resemble anyone’s reality but mine, but there it was Or maybe it wasn’t so much a matter of reality as of expectation-what I felt the world owed s side by side and concluded that there was no puzzle as to ere different Hallie and I had grown up in different families

"Here’s pictures," Uda reported suddenly There was a whole aisle of boxes marked "PHOTOGRAPHS," with inscrutable suffixes I picked up one ly light, so I carried it over to the eastand sat down on a stea it Inside were stacks of ancient eight-by-tens, their brown edges curled like auturaph of a newborn baby with a startled-looking face and h them, one after another, awestruck by the oddity of these children Of course I knew about the eyes, an anoe on both sides But I’d never seen them They tended to darken just hours after birth, and in h life, in Grace or anywhere, without seeing a newborn

On top of the stack of photos was a handwritten page with the heading: "Notes on Methodology" The ink had faded to brown This would all be for his genetics paper: Doc Homer’s careful notations on how he’d set up the caht Apparently he’d rigged some set-up that used powerful flashbulbs, the old-fashioned kind that popped once and then were used up It was before the days of modern electronics

All those babies How they must have screamed, one second after he shot them in the name of science Or in the name of his own desire to set hiant than to come back and do a scientific study of your onspeople, like so ain and kept co familiarity The eyes looked back as if they knewtime

It wasdown over my shoulder

"That’s h it like a card trick She produced another photo "There’s Hallie You didn’t look a thing alike when you were born" To her the eyes were commonplace, not a feature to connect us, but they were the only feature I could see To raphs up to the light, mystified The eyes were unearthly We were two babies not of this world Just like every other one in the stack of photos; twoexactly the opposite of setting hied here, were as pure as anybody in Grace Both sides Our mother’s name was Althea Her family despised him

"We’re puro," I said out loud And then I dropped the photographs because I heard the broken-glass pop of the flash and went blind I heard myself make an odd little whimper