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never reported the twins stolen. Said they had run off to play one day and never come back. The woods were searched and the ponds dragged; they found a lot of dead things, but no Michael, no Samuel. Mama didn’t seem to want the twins back. They had always hated going to church.
    A few weeks later we got a letter from the city. The twins were dead, it said. Could we come.
    In the city morgue, the twins were a vague blurry lump under a plastic blanket, a lump too large to be one person, too small to be two. I looked at their smooth faces and their bodies crusted with blood as the policeman tried to explain. A crackpot doctor, the kind that uses coathangers to tear babies out of women’s wombs in back alleys, had promised the twins he could carry out the operation they wanted. Yes, the doctor was in custody; no, the policeman had no idea where the twins had gotten the money. Angel’s money, I thought.
    Both twins had died of blood loss. The policeman showed us the crude stitches. Even if they had survived the operation, he said, they would have gotten deadly infections within days—the crackpot’s operating room was a hellhole of cockroaches and mold. The policeman made an apologetic joke about the operation being a success even though the patient died. At that, the operation had been a success. The twins certainly were sewn together at the shoulder.
    As we headed home, Daddy’s face hanging heavy and impassive over the steering wheel, Mama praying loudly in the passenger seat, and the twins following us home in a refrigerated train car, I watched the sky for angels.
    (1987)

A Georgia Story
    On a cold January afternoon when the mist was already swirling over the dark ponds in anticipation of evening, I returned to Georgia. Two years and six thousand miles had separated me from the land that was my cradle and, once, my home.
    Two years, six thousand miles. Florida and Disneyworld and liquid sunshine oranges, and in the Haunted Castle, a pale-handed figure suspended from an unseen rafter, slowly turning, turning. New Orleans jazz clubs and whores whose makeup made their eyes look bruised, swollen shut, their lips too lush, the taste of rot in their mouths. The long ribbons of shimmering night highway and sand with the radio turned too loud, trying not to see the lights that glowed like half-closed eyes from my dashboard.
    Listen: once there were four boys who lived in the top story of a church made of ancient wood and stained glass. The church was abandoned, so no one cared if we lived there; we bathed in summer thunderstorms and stayed dirty in winter and walked with candles at night. Hollow-eyed Gene and sharp-faced prettyboy Sammy shared a room and a rum-stained mattress, and created drifting gray mountains of cigarette ash every day. Each tried to outdo the other’s thinness, and they wrote Freudian lyrics together, Gene with his vampire face, Sammy with long tangled sparkles of hair as glossy as ravens, with knowing green eyes that darkened in the presence of pain—ours or his own. At night we heard them through the crumbling walls, with their moans and their biting, and we knew that as long as two creatures in the world still loved each other, we were safe. In the morning their shoulders would be blotched with faint red crescents, their smiles a shade happier.
    Gene’s singing voice—his vox humana, he called it—plunged from a psychosexual Bowie wail to a gutteral croak like the voice of terminal throat cancer. Sammy coaxed cries of pleasure out of a guitar as narrow and flat and shiny as himself. He also painted the walls of our church with murals: black eclipses, cats longer and meaner and more skeletal than any cats were ever meant to be, bowls of crystalline Jell-O like quivering jewels— whatever swam up from the recesses of his mind. He told me once that he mixed a little of his blood with all his paints. I never believed him until I saw him, one night by candlelight, make a shallow razorcut on his