"Opie, you think I'm gonna hang myself for litterin'?"

In spite myself, I smirked while paging through Eden Gray's A Complete Guide to the Tarot. The green digital numbers glowed: 3:10 a.m. Sleeplessness smacked my wan cheeks and licked the horsehair tip to its brush, painting black under my eyes.

James had, up until a half-hour ago, been strumming an acoustic guitar and bawling loudly along with "Alice's Restaurant." Jill, his favorite gal, had brought along the vinyl, accompanied by a carpet-bag and a tie-dyed bong with the cheapest weed available. With pricked ears, I listened to the broken bits of conversation, akin to radio static. Something about filing for a restraining order, and telling the judge that her husband had flipped tables and kicked her while she was pregnant.

Disgusted, I swallowed incredulity. It tasted a bit like phlegm.

But the record had belonged to our folk-loving father, who had spun it at every conceivable family occasion. Since she had ostensibly learned to play the guitar at one point, Jill drew the record in the lottery of the will. Dad had known the fragility of life, apparently, longed before his cracked and shattered like a storebought egg,

The sharp smell of sulphur bit my nose as the match flared in my hand. I touched its torch to the candlewick, lighting the green pillar candle on the altar. With a tap, the electric light buzzed off. Shadows danced on the classical forms of the Gods: Hecate the torch-bearer, the wall plaque of wheat-bearing Demeter and Persephone, Apollo with his lyre and his sister leaping mid-air with bows and hounds, never to be touched by men. Priapic Pan played his pipes, while Hera sat pristine and regal, her spine straight. At their feet, seen or unseen, crystals of all hues and shapes glittered in the light.

My eyes closed.

"I respect the basil!" Jill was shouting, snapping open my lashes again.

"But ayahuasca is the king of plants," James extrapolated. I could imagine him waving his pudgy hands about the room, slicing and dividing the light from the lava lamp. "Ayahuasca is pure DNA. The native people ingest it and they see visions and actually talk with the DNA and cure diseases."

"Dude, it's a plant." Their voices still echoed through the house in raised tones as the bong water burbled. "It's a plant, just like the ganja is a plant, like basil is a plant, like the fucking � the fucking weeds outside are plants, yo."

"But don't you feel there's something more," he drew out the word to three syllables, "in ayahuasca? You don't see DNA when you eat the basil."

"Maybe the basil doesn't want to be eaten. If plants feel, man, maybe they don't want to be eaten."

Their voices finally dropped to the dopey pot lovey-dovey register as I slipped out and brushed my big teeth ("yeah, you got mom's teeth," Jill had always sneered) in the grainy bathroom. The reddish mold surrounding the drain needled me. Hard to clean the bathroom when you're working 60-hour weeks and getting paid for 40, and when your housemate thinks it's his gods-given right as a penis-bearing human to leave water on the floor and the toilet roll unchanged, all while getting Cinderella (who paradoxically holds the fucking lease) to clean it up.

I slipped back in my bedroom and closed the door partway, leaving enough of a crack for Squashblossom to squeeze through. He was curled beneath a small altar I kept to Buddha and Pax, a snoring crescent of orange fur. Then the whispers pricked my ears.

I'm not sure how I could hear them. Perhaps it was before they put on "Alice's Restaurant." The slippery sounds of conspirators, hiss hiss.

"She's so unfriendly," he said, trying a bit too hard to keep his voice low. "She never talks to me when she comes home. What's her problem?"

"Oh, she's always been like that," she hissed back, serpent to serpent. "In her room doing her mumbo jumbo or whatever. She's just, I don't know..."

My teeth ground. Why didn't you say that, sis, the last time I bailed you out of the workhouse? Or lied to your husband? I stared at placid Buddha, but his stone face was hidden in shadow.

"You gonna stay?"

"Is that okay? I've got nowhere else. And no money, you know. It all goes to the lawyers."

"You know I'm cool with it."

"You're the best, Steve!"

"James."

A rustling noise.

"Shit. Yeah, sorry. Steve is the name of my lawyer."

"But what about Jasmine?"

"She'll agree. Leave it to me."

A scratch on vinyl, and then the wailing of Arlo.

"You can get anything you want... at Alice's Restaurant!"

Or at Jasmine's house, apparently. Moaning, I pulled the comforter over my head, ignoring the sweat pooling under my breasts. "Kill! Kill! Kill!" the all-American boy from New York City shouted to the recruiter; I mouthed the words with my Vaselined lips. And somewhere, in an astral plain, it was always Thanksgiving, years before Jill left home. She was arguing with dad, trying to get him to take acid. But the argument disappeared like Mom's orange-cranberry sauce and there we were, with the record, laughing along with Guthrie. I had my nose in a fantasy novel, but I lifted it out on occasion to smile and offer witty repartee.

The tears carved canyons under my sleepless eyes.

"Opie, you think I'm gonna hang myself for litterin'?"

***

When I checked the baleful red blinking light, the mother had called. Her baby had drowned in the backyard pool a few weeks before, a fact unearthed by our obituary writer than day. With a shrug, he copied the obit for me, and plunked it down on my desk before returning to his paid-for litany of death and demise. Since said death (also known as tragedy or catastrophe, goat-song or bad-stars) had occurred on my beat, the onus had fallen upon me to pick up the baleful dirty receiver and dial the cops for information.

The police captain shrieked and chastised, probably waving a pointed finger at the other end of the line, over the worn desk covered with reports and mug shots. The sentiment? You'll pour salt on the poor family's oozing wounds, gleefully dancing like skull-wreathed ghouls over the freshly-dug grave.

"I'm just doing my job," I replied temperately, clicking my pen as a way to fill up the void of empty air that stretched like a sea between me and every other human being on the planet. "It's public information."

Brenda and Bob, another editor with predilections toward shit-flinging tabloid fare, had bid me to clamber into my ramshackle vehicle and place a curt knock on their worn wood door. My job, as usual, dangled as the sword of Damocles over my head; I shifted in my long skirt, the perpetual courtier. And as I drove by, I plucked the press credentials from my dashboard to impart a certain stealth: the stealth of the seven of swords, the gray-cloaked thief with his five-o'clock shadow (the fashion choice of all bona fide criminals) and a load of clanking steel hid under his armpit.

I drove past. No cars were parked in the pebbled driveway, and no lights shown from the pale green siding. In the back, the pool had loomed, an empty womb. At the funeral, I wagered, and thanked the Old Woman for small mercies. The captain's words had punctured my psychological aorta, you see: "nothing but a vulture." And there is a dead child in a police brief, shunted to the lefthand column along with bank robberies and gas station rapes (the muders have their own, boxed-off, vaulted place on the front page of the American psyche). But if the cars had adorned the driveway and motion dripped and dazzled from the curtained windows, I don't think I could've put my index finger to the shining light of the doorbell.

The grief would have rushed out and bowled me over, a linebacker garbed in the uniform of invisibility. The enormity of what I do, the plague that I spread with every wanton stroke of my blue pen, would have whispered in my ear: "Jasmine, why don't you go home and slash your wrists, you worthless sack of shit? Why don't you just kick the grieving and mock the people in despair? Isn't that what you're doing?" Oh, I know the argument of purity, with its cold sparkling halo and its archangel sword: "The public has the right to know."

Does it? Does it have the right to know how tears etched canyons into a mother's face? How the father's reddened hands helplessly clutched the air, forming fists to smash fate itself and, failing that, nosy reporters? As I sat in my idling vehicle, I watched a catbird light on the yellowing grass of their summer lawn. "Meow," said the slate-gray bird, and then hopped into the air, disappearing.

Does the public have the right to know that? Does it have the right to know how the only solace I received as a human being that day came from a slate-gray bird which fixed me with black beady eyes? Does it have a right to know the big-stick beat-you-down policies of the disheveled newsroom, where loud voices win over whispered reason and morale is considered the enemy of public information? Don't say a word, an attorney would advice, hunched in a hyperexpensive Armani and carrying a trademarked briefcase. Don't say a word, because everything you say, feel, do, see or eat will be held against you, will be beaten into a thin blade of pure steel and dangled with embroidery thread over the top of your skull.

Don't say anything because you are merely the world's eye, the observer, the floating pupil on an eyestalk, a camera that snatches images with words. And so. I go through life weaving other people's tales into elaborate tapestries of fact and description, telling what I see but carefully scooting out of the picture's range, pretending that I am a ghost, already dead, a clothed Victorian watching the miniskirted girls tread on my mossy grave.

Once, drowning in something I disdain to call loneliness, I told Rachel Wong this whole convoluted idea after she slipped the headset off her shining black hair. Her lashes blinked behind her thick lensed-glasses, as if I had spontaneously began uttering Turkish poetry.

"You know, maybe you should go see someone, like a shrink or something," she said after a moment, wetting her lips with her tongue. And my invisible reaching hand dangled to my side, slapped and beaten, covered with metaphysical red weals.

Reaching out? It's for other people. You see, there was a great glorious day in which angels, boddhisattvas or generic higher-beings descended from the escalator of heaven. In their lily-white hands, they bore laminated cards with the words: "Granted to the possessor: the right to complain." Black inked cursive, looping curls. Apparently, I was not on hand when these laminated cards were issued; it seems that I was out on assignment.

But back I drove from the seemingly-empty house, and I crafted the baby-death into a small article. And nothing more occurred until three weeks later, when a woman with a deep yet strong voice called, leaving a number. Intrigued, I called her.

Her name was Tanisha, and her baby had drowned. Now the state was after her, seeking to place her three other children into foster homes and shooting in the bush a fledgling idea to open her own daycare center. Would I come down and see her?

And so I did. The steering wheel twisted beneath my palms, a shuttle pulling the thread through the narrowing winding streets, retracing my steps back to where the fatal pool had stood, a blue womb, and a slate gray bird fixed me with its eyes, and the thoughts had tumbled from the bitter recesses of self-loathing, battening me into my stained seats. This time, the pale green siding held burgeoning life. A handful of children shrieking and bolted on the lawn, watched by a softly-smiling woman with braided hair. Her dark skin absorbed the summer light like warm earth; I half-expected her to leave zinnias in her footsteps.

Letting a long breath whistle out through my pink-painted mouth, my feet reached the grass and my hand reached out of its own accord.

"Oh yes," she said. "I'm her sister, Rashida."

She led me to a heavyset woman in a carnation pink dress, who was peering intently at the contents of a manila folder. The round face glanced upward, and broke into an official smile. She bid me sit in the lawn chair on the deck, and told me the tale. My pen scribbled furiously.

Yes, I was home that day with her four children. Rashi had run out to the store for some milk. See that deck up there? The thick brown flesh beneath her arms wiggled as she pointed. It connected with the pool. We always kept the pool gate latched shut, and blocked with a heavy chair. Tommy (the two-year-old, his casket heaped with zinnias and carnations) could never unlatch it by himself. I don't know what happened, or why it was unlatched. That never happened before, ever. I'm a good mom.

Yes. The children � her four and Rashi's son, an older boy named Jarrel � had been playing in the yard. Jarrel swung Tommy, and the child's laughter pierced the air with delightful hooks as he swirled in the summer air, round and round. Coming from the kitchen with a glass of iced tea, Tanisha briefly sat at the kitchen table to do some bills. She could see the children buzzing and shrieking and gamboling in the green outside the ivory lace curtains. With a black pen, she inked her name on the check. And somehow a moment became ten, the minutes slipping stealthily, sand in an hourglass. She rose and gathered her skirt - she never wore pants, as the good Lord intended - and went out to the green.

Jarrel was there, with little Jacob, Kallie and Kendra. But Tommy's absence struck her straight to the bone. It was the longest five minutes of her life.

Calling "Tommy! Tommy!", the children and Tanisha, in separate teams, scoured bathroom and bedroom and shed. Finally, Tanisha clambered up the wood steps of the deck and looked into the blue round of the pool. And there, she saw him, the tag of his t-shirt waving a white flag. She jumped in, her skirt flaring around her in the water, wailing and imploring and trying to get the water from his lungs. Jarrel called 9-11. The cop car's red and blue lights swarmed the front lawn before the ambulance came, too late. And though the sky gleamed a robin's egg blue, the day was drenched in black and gray.

Rashi, plastic bag in hand, covered her mouth with long fingers as she approached. The bag went on the kitchen table, crowded with bills, as she rushed to hold her sister in her arms. The milk, forgotten, would later spoil. And when George, Tanisha's husband, came home, the two went out to the pool, and began pulling it apart with their bare hands. Blood ran down George's work-hardened arms, and tears coursed down his cheeks, bereft of their accustomed smile. And sitting in her yard, I saw the pool was only a facade: half had been taken down, and lay in a pile of pale blue vinyl. The rest seemed like one of those faux buildings in North Korea, standing two-dimensional and empty.

"We plan on building a memorial garden when this is all done," she said, her face oddly calm. "You know, like the one on Somers Street? Did you ever see that one?"

I nodded: tulips and lavender and floral fantasies, accentuated by finely placed shrubbery. A restful place.

But it wasn't done, not even when the small white casket heaped with summer's best went into the dark earth womb. A 23-year-old blonde with a clipboard came to the door, asking questions. State employee: she flashed her credentials. Grieving, Tanisha and George answered honestly, dabbing their tears away with white tissues. And then, a few days later, the worker came back. The verdict?

"We're under observation because the state considers us unfit parents," she said, her bitter tongue striking the Ts. "This has taken away our grief and replaced it with anger. We're angry because we haven't even been given the right to grieve."

The door to the house creaked; George had come home. A big man, he sat beside her on the patio. She rattled out the verdict: they could lose their remaining three children to foster homes. ("Why is it that this happens to people of color?" George asked, articulating every syllable, hands on his knees as his torso pressed forward. "I'm a professional man. I run a contracting business. My wife is a stay-at-home mother. We're good people.") Tanisha, who has worked as a teacher's aide before Tommy was born, had been saving money to eventually open her own day-care center. She even has a prospective site picked out (a vacant storefront on Main Street) and a name: Kinder Corner. But it will remain a fantasy until her record is purged; "They said I'm on a provider black list now," she explained.

On her fingers, she rattled off her involvements: PTO, taking care of the neighbor's children, former teacher's aide. Neighborhood letters written to the Easter Bunny end up, via prior arrangements, in her mailbox, and she answers them and slips the answer on the doorstep under cover of night with a small bag of jelly beans.

They took me through their house ("Forgive the disorder," she said mildly. "We've been busy with the funeral."). Old-fashioned couches, since Tanisha is a self-described "Victorian at heart." Framed photographs of smiling children. She reached up and took one down from the wall. "This is Tommy," she said fondly. And I saw a small boy with laughter stretching his face into a wide smile, holding a red firetruck. "He always wanted to be a fireman."

***

With a borrowed photograph, my car crankily made it way back to the office. Brenda and Bob stride over, asking the verdict. "They're trying to bust the Easter Bunny," I replied with a grin, thinking of her carnation-pink dress. My fingers dial the state office. "We can't comment on particular cases," the spokeswoman said crisply.

"Do you investigate every accidental death?"

"Yes."

"Is it state law?"

"Yes," she said, boredly.

With questions, I attempted to inflate the monosyllables. Yes, day care providers must have clean records. Is it difficult to get one's record purged? "I can't comment on that."

And so, I sat down, chewing my pen. To the state, Tanisha made a choice � to neglect her child � when she saw the small pile of bills on the kitchen table, awaiting stamps and a few checks. To the state, tragedies never occur; stars never cross in odd unseen constellations far above our heads. Attentions are never drawn to stare at a picture on the wall; it's all a matter of choice. Tragedy? Merely a subject for the morning soaps. Yes, say the officials with their clipboards, there is always someone to blame. Someone must be at fault when the sparrow falls, and God doesn't kill children.

Nope. It's all your fault, parents. For giving the kid refined sugar, or sending him to bed ten minutes too late, or marrying the wrong man, having the wrong skin tone, or having your attention lapse for ten minutes, the first time since you began popping out kids a dozen years before. It's all your fault, parents, and there's no forgiveness. Just therapy sessions for the kiddies, and funny pink pills. The latest state endeavor to protect children: eliminate parents entirely.

And somewhere, a state worker does nothing to a white woman who has snorted coke in the agency bathroom. She gets to keep her kids.

Damn, I'm being uncharitable, I mused. Crunch crunch, went the pen.

Bias crouched on my desk and pointed a claw into my heart. I swatted it from the newsprint scattered surface, and took a lunch before I sat down again. And when I did, I simply related what I saw from my disembodied eye, floating on a cloud above the heavy woman in the pink dress, the children gamboling in the yard, the two-dimensional gutted pool, the manila folder full of documentation, the state spokeswoman with the bored needling soprano. Cool and distant, I pieced it together, a quilt.

But there's a secret in the stitches: I embroidered my heart in there, hidden among the words and the batting. Only I could tell. The rest? Just the facts, ma'am, and a damn good description of the scene.

***

(to be continued...)