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the growing darkness like a drunken lightning bug before it landed and dropped through the iron grate at the end of his short front walk. "Nice evenin' though-ain't it?"

Myrtle's hands settled on her hips.

"Tis that, I'll say-you hungry?"

"Myrtle" He smiled at her, "You know I can't say no' to your cookin'."

"Mm-hm, I know." Her expression changed from a relaxed contemplation of the evening to one of thoughtful purpose. She sniffed and nodded. "Hoe-cake's ready. C'mon over and we'll sit the porch while we eat."

"I'll bring the tea," Lucius said, turning for his door. "Just made up a big-o jar of it."

"All righty. . ." Myrtle said already moving through her own door.

A few minutes later Lucius gave a knock on Myrtle's door jamb. "Comin' in, Myrtle!"

"Okay, I'm in the kitchen!"

The small front room was so familiar Lucius hardly noticed the clutter. The house was no different from his, architecturally. It was the same as most every house on the Mill Hill. Myrtle's, however, clearly was that of a woman's, even if she was a pack-rat who kept everything with even an ounce of value, most of it questionable.

Stacks of newspapers and magazines stood carefully on any floor space that the woman didn't need to walk on. There were six Ball jars full of old rubber bands: probably every rubber band that had ever been wrapped about a newspaper that landed on her porch. On top of a couple of short stacks of magazines sitting beside her rocker, were two old coffee cups jam-packed with old pencils that she used for the crossword. Shelves about the small room held countless Dutch Girl figurines that Myrtle had always been inexplicably compelled to collect. A Bible and a Baptist hymnal occupied most of the space on the little table beside her rocker; only a little room left for her coffee or tea as well as the ashtray that she never allowed to become over full.

There were times, when Lucius would sit in here with Myrtle watching TV, that he would wonder how quickly this room might go up in flames if she ever dropped a live ash from a smoke, or worse, fell asleep with one still lit. All the old paper in the room made it smell...combustible.

The little door between the front room and the middle one, which both she and Lucius used, in either house, as bedrooms, was almost blocked by two towering pillars of the Gastonia Gazette; the bottom half of each quite yellow with age; the very ends of any extended pages brown with nicotine. He saw her in the kitchen at the far end of the house.

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