Read Ordinary Light A Memoir (N) for Free Online

behind my great big pointed white hood.
    “Is it okay if I take this off?” I finally thought to ask, lifting the top part of the costume off over my head as we turned into the last cul-de-sac of the evening.
    “That sounds like a good idea,” Kim’s dad answered, sensing it might be easier that way for all of us.
    At home, I wasn’t given access to any of the loot until it had all been spread out on the family room floor and examined. We’d been hearing rumors of kids eating Halloween candy that had been spiked with hallucinogens. One child, the story went, had even been given a candied apple with a whole razor blade inside. (In one version of the tale, he’d sliced his tongue open biting into the treat. In another, he’d bitten into the apple just shy of the blade.) Anything that had come open in my trick-or-treat bag was relegated to the trash. A box of raisins was discarded, too, just in case. What was left was a confectionary spectacle: candy enough for all seven of us and then some. My parents laid claim to anything with coconut: Mounds and Almond Joy bars and the chewy tricolor Neapolitan squares wrapped in clear cellophane. My siblings cozied up to their own small share of the stash even as the last witches and robots of the season climbed up our stone-speckled front steps.
    Where exactly was the occult? I wondered, staring out the storm door into the finally quiet evening. Was there really a place where spirits and demons—all the beings God disliked—came from or congregated? Who made them and what did they want? Had they been good at first and only turned bad, like the Klansmen still alive in my mother’s memory, the ones who must have watched quizzically from the margins of her mind, not knowing whether, at the sight of me, to feel a sense of victory or defeat? They must have been far from God, but how could that be, if God was everywhere? Maybe they hovered between Him and us, though that, too, seemed wrong, for didn’t God live in the hearts of those who believed? What was it like for God as we went aboutour lives, doing the things He loved and the things He hated, sometimes without even knowing the difference between the two? And what was it like for the strange in-between beings, the ones we pretended to run from on Halloween? How many worlds were there, and what did they want from us, there, in our houses, under the low roofs of our lives?

KIN

    W henever my father talked about New York, his face pinched in and words like filth and squalor darted out of his mouth. “Why would anyone choose to live in New York?” he’d ask, and, not knowing any better, I’d figure it must be the kind of place where life was so relentlessly mean that people often came to blows with whatever object was closest at hand. If it was, what did it mean for my aunts and uncles—women with thick legs and strong arms who clapped their hands and threw back their heads when they laughed; men who called everyone by nicknames, kicked off their shoes, and ate sandwiches at midday made from biscuits and peach preserves and thick strips of leftover bacon that stuck out past the bread? What kind of lives were they, not to mention my innocent cousins, living in a place like New York?
    When I was six years old, my cousin Nina visited from Manhattan. In one of our family photo albums, there is a picture of the two of us together as babies, sitting on the porch of our grandmother’s house in white sun hats with elastic bands under our chins. I hadn’t met her many more times than that, but just about every autumn, I’d inherit a large box full of Nina’s outgrown dresses. Those two things, the photo and the dresses, always gave me the impression that Nina and I were the best of friends, but when she arrived, it dawned on me that I was greeting a stranger.
    Nina was two years older than me, tall and thin, with long legs covered in mosquito bites, which she scratched with an exquisitevigor. When my mother told her that scraping