Original Fire: Selected and New Poems

How Josette Takes Care of It

So the trouble was that Potchikoo had left his old body in the ground, empty, and something had found a place to live.

The people said the only thing to do was trap the mean twin and then get rid of him. But no one could agree on how to do it. People just talked and planned, no one acted. Finally Josette had to take the matter into her own hands.

One day she made a big pot of stew, and into it she put a bird. Into the roasted bird, Josette put a bit of blue plaster that had fallen off the Blessed Virgin’s robe while she cleaned the altar. She took the stew and left the whole pot just outside the cemetery fence. From her hiding place deep in a lilac bush, she saw the mean twin creep forth. He took the pot in his hands and gulped down every morsel, then munched the bird up, bones and all. Stuffed full, he lay down to sleep. He snored. After a while, he woke and looked around himself, very quietly. That was when Josette came out of the bush.

“In the name of the Holy Mother of God!” she cried. “Depart!”

So the thing stepped out of Potchikoo’s old body, all hairless and smooth and wet and gray. But Josette had no pity. She pointed sternly at the dark stand of pines, where no one went, and slowly, with many a sigh and backward look, the thing walked over there.

Potchikoo’s old body lay, crumpled like a worn suit of clothes, where the thing had stepped out. Right there, Josette made a fire, a little fire. When the blaze was very hot, she threw in the empty skin. It crackled in the flames, shed sparks, and was finally reduced to a crisp of ashes, which Josette brushed carefully into a little sack, and saved in her purse.