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even know that what you’re seeing is from a time already gone. You get lost in it. Feel like you got all the time in the world. A future. But it’s just your old life repeating itself and repeating itself and repeating itself. Those shivers you felt on warm days were just you—in two places at once.
    So powerful, these flashes. Ask the dead. Ask the people who survive near death. Ask ’em how the flashes change their whole life from then on.
    Or for the empty, it changes nothing.
    I guess the most important parts of life ain’t measured by years or days or minutes but by moments. Moments that come in flashes here, only some of ’em good like seeing my sister, Hazel, again. I was seven years old in one of them flashes. Twelve in another. My favorite was the time when Hazel was teaching me how to tumble. And in another, I was six years old and she helped me lose my first tooth with a string and a slammed door.
    The hell is the bad memories. Going back again and again and not being able to make a damn bit of difference. But God had mercy on me.
    It’s been said that justice is getting what you deserve. And mercy is not getting the bad you deserve. Grace is getting a good thing, even when you don’t deserve it. So if I would’ve named my good thing, I’d have called her Grace. But someone else named her Josephine.

5 / 1850
    Tallassee, Alabama
    W HERE DO WE start when we tell the stories of our loved ones? On the day they were born or the day they mattered?
    Mattered to other people, I mean, did something worth talking about. I guess I could start with who begot who like the Bible do, but where somebody comes from only matters to people who come from something and as it was, she came from me.
    Me, and the men who would become her fathers.
    See, my baby’s real father wasn’t the man who loved me. But if wishing could make it so, I’d of traded him for the man I shoulda loved—Charles. I woulda made him the first daddy to her ’cause first means something.
    Charles wasn’t the man who got me pregnant.
    He wasn’t first to hold my baby with his hands, either, or feel her tiny bones wiggling ’round in a loose bag of see-through skin. It was somebody else who was first to listen to her soft breaths flutter.
    Charles shoulda been all them.
    But he wasn’t.
    When I first knew Charles, I never thought he’d be the kind of man who woulda made a good daddy. He never seemed like he needednobody, especially a child. And his body never looked like it could care for one, neither. His hands too big to care for little baby thangs, his face too beastly to call a comfort, his arms too strong to hold something gentle. I’d reckon he’d crush her reaching for sugar. And he was alone when I first knew him. Alone is how he liked it. Safe. Never having to wonder what it would be to give hisself to somebody completely.
    But I was wrong.
    Wrong, ’cause he chose my baby, Josephine. Wrong, ’cause he once tried to choose me.
    I wish he woulda smelled sweet to me like a man looking for love or seemed soft like a man who could love me silly and forgive me for the thangs he didn’t know about me. I wish I woulda felt his sun on my cheeks, breathed in his cool air and noticed the difference, like stepping from the cool shade of the trees to the hot sun directly. I wish he woulda scorched goose bumps on my arms so I woulda thought of him regular.
    But he was just Charles. Another man, not a miracle.
    Momma used to say that when you meet the one God sent you, you’d recognize him at once ’cause we all got souls trapped in our bodies and our souls got memories of a better life before this one; memories that come to us in our dreams, even when we awake.
    I didn’t remember Charles that way. I mighta loved him if I did. The way Josey did.
    She saw through the deep folds and scars on his bald head from when he was set on fire. She saw through the wash