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something funny about God. The closer she got, the more His form blurred and changed, so that she caught glimpses of tiny figures moving, colors surging, skeins of ceaseless activity going on all at once and overlapping inside the enormous cloudy bulk of God.
    She recognized the moving figures: Papa Sol, teasing her at the breakfast table by telling her to look, quick, at the horse on the windowsill, and grabbing one of the strawberries from her cereal while she looked with eager, little-girl credulity; Roberta, crying and crying in her crib while grown-up Rose hovered in the hallway torn between exhaustion and rage and love and fear of doing the wrong thing no matter what she did; Fred, sparkling with lying promises he’d never meant to keep, but pleased to entertain her with them; Stephanie, with crooked braids and scabby knees, counting the pennies from the penny jar that Rose had once kept for her. And that was the guy, there, Aleck Mills, one of Fred’s associates, with whom love had felt like love.
    If she looked beyond these images, Rose realized that she could see, deeper in the maze, the next phase of each little scene, and the next, the whole spreading tangle of consequences that she was here to witness, to comprehend, and to judge.
    The web of her awareness trembled as it soared, curling in on itself as if caught in a draught of roasting air.
    “Simkin, where are you?” she cried.
    “Here,” the Angel answered, bobbing up alongside of her and looking, for once, a bit flustered with the effort of keeping up. “And you don’t need me anymore. Guardian angels don’t need guardian angels.”
    “Now I lay me down to sleep,” Rose said, remembering that saccharine Humperdinck opera she had taken Stephanie to once at Christmas time, years ago, because it was supposed to be for kids. “A bunch of vampires watch do keep?”
    “You could put it that way,” the Angel said.
    “What about Dracula?” Rose said. “Could I have done that instead?”
    “Sure,” the Angel said. “There’s always a choice. Who do you think it is who goes around making deals for the illusion of immortal life? And the price isn’t anything as romantic as your soul. It’s just a little blood, for as long as you’re willing.”
    “And when you stop being willing?”
    The Angel flashed its blank eyes upward. “Your life will wait as long as it has to.”
    “I’m scared of my life,” Rose confessed. “I’m scared there’s nothing worthwhile in it, nothing but furniture, and statuettes made into lamps.”
    “Kid,” the Angel said, “you should have seen mine.”
    “Yours?”
    “Full of people I tried to make into furniture, all safe and comfortable, with lots of dust cuzzies stuck underneath.”
    “What’s in mine?” Rose said.
    “Go and see,” the Angel said gently.
    “I am, I’m going,” Rose said. In her heart she moaned, This will be hard, this is going to be so hard.
    But she was heartened by a little scene flickering high up where God’s eye would have been if there had been a god instead of this mountain of Rose’s own life, and in that scene Stephanie and the boy did walk together on a winter beach. By the way they hugged and turned up their collars and hurried along, it was cold and windy there; but they kept close together and made blue-lipped jokes about the cold.
    Beyond them, beyond the edges of the cloud-mountain itself, Rose could make out nothing yet. Perhaps there was nothing, just as Papa Sol had promised. On the other hand, she thought, whirling aloft, so far Papa Sol had been 100 per cent dead wrong.

Stackalee
     
    Norman Partridge
     
Stagger Lee – or “Stackalee”, “Stackolee”, “Stagolee”, and other versions – was a real man, Lee Shelton, who murdered William “Billy” Williams on Christmas night, 1895, in St Louis, Missouri. Versions of a song about the incident were sung by African-Americans long before folklorist John Lomax first published one in 1911. Stag Lee became a