No One Gets a Fourth

I’ve witnessed three miracles, but they were all passed over as luck and that supposed grace was squandered. Death came eventually and it came slow but in those moments, these were the sounds of repentance, which you said was like a shush of shattering windows, and the caw-wail of winter’s last bird.

The first miracle was our fall back away from the Amtrak train as it sped past and cast pennies into the gulley. Copper rounds on twin steel rail. Catch one! Catch me. We. We fell, fell, fell to the vibrating earth. You had wanted us to feel the track. We were seven and the sin was whispered in the attic later that day. Your train waited.

The second miracle came along a crack of ice in the Saginaw Bay. We followed the fog roll away from shore. You chunked the metal spud into milky ice every few feet. No cracks. Chunk! No cracks. Chunk! No cracks. Shore was long gone swallowed by that fog when you said we might be a mile and the spud Chunk! Cracked. Icy bay water sloshed up over our feet. A break shot out into the fog. “This way!” it beckoned. Who wanted to follow? We were eleven and retraced the spud holes back. I thought I heard a crow behind us in the fog. You said there were no ghosts this far out.

The third miracle came with a head crack on concrete. One twin feels the other’s agony. Your skull rattled and broke; mine reflected invisible electric. And I swore I saw your spirit spray out in a cascade of blood and manifest on the November morning frost. Your eyes turned milky like that miracle ice. We were nineteen. There was a pronunciation of your death. Then a slow resurrection. You remembered nothing since the Bay ice. And in your recollection, we followed that crack. “Where did we go?” you asked. Roll the dice and say hello to the devil. No one gets a fourth.