"Yes sir," she says, trying hard not to let him hear how scared she really is, trying to feel the way a grown-up would feel, brave like her grandmother when she shot the rabid fox.

"What you want me to do?"

"Stay where you are, and I want you to start counting backwards from one hundred. Not out loud, just start counting to yourself, in your head."

"Backwards from a hundred."

"And don't you say a word, girl, no matter what you see. Think about them numbers. Imagine you got a stick and you're drawing numbers in the sand. When you get done drawing one, imagine that you take your left foot and wipe the sand smooth again before you draw the next number. Can you do that?"

"Yes sir. I can do that."

"Then we both gonna be right as rain," he tells her, and a second later there's a knock at the door. Dancy looks at the checkerboard, bad luck not to finish a game, and wishes she'd stayed home and watched her mother sew, wishes that she'd followed Eleanore Road out to the hilly place where she sits sometimes and gazes across the tops of the pines at the far-away lights of Milligan, wishes she were any place instead of in this cabin at the edge of the black lake at the end of Wampee Creek.

"Now, Dancy," Mr. Jube says. "You start countin' now," and she does.

Moonlight and magnolia, starlight in your hair, all the world a dream, a dream come true, did it really happen, was I really there, was I really there with you…

A vast lion of white connect-the-dots fire, frigid pinpricks against eternity, and the imaginary lions men draw between the stars. Capricious swipe of a twinkling paw, and light falls from midnight autumn skies, November 1833, and the glowing dust of comets and all the things a small blue world brushes against in its lonely race around the sun; bright and frozen things to burn as they streak and scream and fall, falling since the universe drew its first scalding breath and coughed up Creation, but finally falling down. Angels down from Heaven, and fingers groping in a dark place touch something soft and cold that burns-

We lived our little drama, we kissed in a field of white.

November 13th, 1833, and the wide Southern night sky gone bright as noon. Startled men and women coming suddenly awake in their beds, squinting, dazzled eyes for the darkness that wasn't there. And This must be judgment day, they whispered and listened for Gabriel's trumpets and Seraphim explanation. Terrified, amazed, humbled at this end, surely, this ice-white curtain of flame drawing closed across history, and there are times when all men pray to one thing or another.

I can't forget the glamour, your eyes held a tender light, and stars fell…

Inevitable intersections, convergences, the crossing of ancient, invisible paths: 1799, 1833, 1866, 1867, 1966, forever and ever, and the lion swats at glittering baubles hung for its or no one else's pleasure.

… and stars fell…

Mobile Commercial Register (Nov. 13, 1833)-"Last night, or rather very early this morning, the vault of Heaven presented a brilliant spectacle, differing from any we have ever heard of. We regret that our slumbers were so heavy as to prevent our observing it, but a great number of our acquaintance were roused by their servants, to whom it had imparted no small degree of alarm. Meteors of the description commonly termed falling stars, but of unusual splendor and magnitude, were seen shooting in every part of the heavens, in every line of direction below horizontal. Some from above appeared descending, (but as is usual in the same phenomenon as it ordinarily appears in single instances) they were generally extinguished before coming in range with the level of the earth. Hundreds were seen darting at the same moment. Their vivid corruscations continued for hours, and only ceased when the light of day compelled them to hide their diminishing heads, so that for any thing we know to the contrary, they may still be disporting in the upper air.

"Philosophers have not been able to offer any plausible theory in explanation of the description of meteors. To say that they are electric, or that they proceed from the spontaneous combustion of inflammable vapor, is only to evade rational enquiry by the employment of learned words. Before either of these principles can be admitted as sufficient causes, it must be shewn in what manner electricity can be accumulated in an atmosphere pure and dry, or what there is in such a region of the air as to develope explosive gas, or to ignite it after it has been produced. We believe it is admitted that no branch of scientific investigation so completely puts the ingenuity of philosophy at defence, as meteorology."

And some smoldering something flashes swift across Mississippi and Alabama and marsh-grey Florida skies, one more momentary inferno in a burning dawn, the blink of a million frightened eyes, and it plunges sizzling and sputtering into a deep black pool. A splash and charcoal wisp of steam, and the waters take it down into the soothing, fishsecret silt, the slime and a blackness not so perfect as that former, lost Paradise, but the pain that seared away its soul is cooled, and in a hundred years it will hardly remember the lion's paw, the flames, the fall, the innocent eons of weightless vacuum before gravity's deceiving pull.

I never planned, in my imagination, a situation so heavenly, a fairy land where no one else could enter, and in the center, just you and me, dear…

November 13th, 1833, and for seventy years nothing and no one looked into the pool but soulless alligator eyes and wild cats and the Indians who were afraid to stare too long into those murky, unmoving depths. A stain on the land, a seeping hole in the leprous skin of the swamp, blue lights above the waters on a long summer's evening, and Apalachee mothers told their children about the demons from the moon, the starfall whisperers below the water.

"At night there, something uncanny happens: the water burns."

Infinities away, the lion closed its sleepy eyes and opened them and closed them again. And again. And again.

The world turns.

The water burns.

My heart beat like a hammer, my arms wound around you tight, and stars fell on Alabama…last night.

Knuckles like a hammer on the door, flesh and bone on wood, and "You do exactly like I told you," Mr. Jube says. Glistening beads of sweat on his brow, sweat hanging like dew from the end of his nose. "Tomorrow mornin', I'll go into Milligan and buy you a whole bag of them green jellybeans." And Dancy nods her head, but he doesn't see, is already reaching for the doorknob with unsteady hands, and whoever it is out there knocks again, harder than before, and the door shudders on its hinges. She imagines that she's holding a crooked, long hickory stick and carefully draws the number 95 in the sand at the edge of the lake.

"Just hold your horses a goddamned minute," the old man croaks, the knob turning in his hand, and he opens the door.

And Dancy sees the eyes and forgets all about the numbers, 95 erased with the toe of her boot, smooth sand like brown sugar, and that's as far as she goes; there's nothing out there but the eyes, twin balls of the deepest, the most vivid blue she's ever seen or imagined, roiling, pupilless eyes that shine bright enough to blind and somehow give off no light whatsoever. Blue eyes bulging from the fabric of the night, and Mr. Jube takes a small, hesitant step backwards and looks down at the floor between his feet.

Don't you scream now, girl, Dancy thinks in the old man's voice. Don't you dare start screamin'. She tries to look away, look down like Mr. Jube did, tries to bow her head so there's nothing but her shoes and the floorboards, the spilled jellybeans, but she can't-not for all the tea in China, all the love of God-and her heart skips a beat as those blue eyes narrow down to suspicious, angry slits and glare past Mr. Jube directly at her.