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night she seemed to have flattened into a one-dimensional shape, an odd, rangy figure printed against the rising moon. She flicked a hip one way, then the other, to get the cricks out. Next she did a funny little jig to kick the kinks out of her legs. She could have been one of the stick-figure pictures chipped in the sandstone walls of the desert. With her spidery limbs locked in some antic posture, she appeared not quite human but instead some rowdy creature from a long-ago Indian story. Maybe she was the ghost of Kokopelli, the humpbacked flute player.
    They walked into the house. “’Night,” Constanzasaid softly. She had left the flashlight out on the counter if Jerry wanted to look for the sewing machine. It was just past eight, too early to go to bed unless one got up at three thirty in the morning. Jerry did a little bit of homework at the kitchen table, then yawned and went to her bedroom. She stretched out on her bed and began to read the assignment for English class. It was Romeo and Juliet . Boy, was the nurse stupid. They were going to have to write a composition on Romeo and Juliet . Maybe she would write how if it weren’t for the stupid nurse, Romeo and Juliet might have survived. Of course then there would be no tragedy. Maybe Shakespeare could have written it as a comedy. Romeo, Juliet, and Tubby the Stupid Nurse . The teacher said they should come up with their own ideas. Her eyes grew heavy. She fell asleep in her clothes on the bed.
    There were the little hinges. Silken hinges in her throat, way way in the back. And then the slight muddy taste as the little door started to jiggle. They felt no bigger than grains of sand, but she could feel each one of their eight tiny feet as it crawled up her throat and across her tongue. The hinges squeaked and the trapdoor slammed. Silence.
    Jerry woke up, her heart beating wildly. She sat straight up on her bed and slammed her fist against her mouth. It was so real. She couldn’t believe it. It had felt so real. She put her other hand to her neck. She closed her eyes and could actually imagine perfectly the trapdoor in the very back of her throat. It had been an awful feeling. She could feel a pulse in her neck throbbing. She got up to get a glass of water. The moon had risen and its light streamed through the window. It was as if she were standing in a silver pool. She was wide awake. There would be no going back to sleep.

Chapter 5
    T HE CELLAR DOOR creaked as she opened it, and once more Jerry thought of those hinges of silken thread and touched her throat. There were probably zillions of spiders in the cellar. She swung the flashlight around. Its beam was weak. She could almost feel the light leaking out of it. So she pressed the button to flick it off and stood on the cellar steps. And that was when she noticed that the darkness did not look like darkness. It was the color of tea and slightly luminous, as if a flame flickered behind it. Amber-colored tea. The flashlight had made everything a flat, lifeless white, but as Jerry stood there it seemed that this amber air almost began to glow. It must be that this cellar was carved out of the red New Mexican earth. It suddenly struck Jerry that it was very possible that the foundations ofConstanza’s house could in fact be the remnants of some sandstone slabs. Maybe one wall had, in another time thousands of years ago, been a cliff. She didn’t know much about geology, but she knew that things could shift. Mountains could slide, cliffs tumble; the crust of the earth could even crack open and leave canyons. So where her aunt’s house now stood, well, in another time there could have been another landscape, almost another world.
    Standing at the top of the steps, she realized that it even smelled like earth and stone. As her eyes adjusted, she could pick out shapes. The shapes seemed to swell up, disembodied like spirits searching for something to attach themselves to and become real objects. She crept down