His family knew he had died in the car accident; Jenny couldn't keep that from anyone

His relatives knew he died in the car accident; Jenny couldn't keep that from anyone. The litany, the scrutiny of sympathy from people she barely knew made her ever more desperate for her soul uncurl itself before it collapsed on itself from sheer tightness and guard.

But as it was they could not know the rest. Yet they would have to. It would become obvious in a few months. Funny how some things which cannot be done so often must be.

That she had been in the vehicle as well, that also was open to the public, but with everyone who whispered, "At least she has the baby," the prospect of telling the rest became more unendurable, just as it became even more the inevitable evil.

Not a scratch on her.

Didn't even have to go to the hospital.

Very quiet - hardly said a thing.

Did she even cry?

Of course she did. It was bad enough for tears to fall so steadily, so inexorably, that she half wondered if the eyes themselves were converting back into the fluid from which all human cells begin.

But another kind of tears, sticky, deathly, wept from her womb.

And that was why she stayed in the house and answered no calls. Her one dear friend - Jenny had lived in a bubble of isolation deep in one with no family, broken only by the friend and the crush-lover-husband - dropped a loaf of newly baked bread, a container of soup, and some fresh produce on the doorstep every three days. After the first four deliveries she stopped pleading with Jenny to let her in and talk. Jenny believed the friend suspected the truth, but trusted her to tell no one. Once Jenny slipped a card with "Thank you" in shaky letters underneath the front door.

The other thing that arrived, this time in the mail, were life insurance checks she carefully put into an envelope, waiting for the day she had the courage to go to the bank. She didn't really use the electricity, much of the water, or phone anyway. The only phone call she had made since the crash was to send in her resignation as supervisor at the local wind power plant. Bills could still be automatically paid from her bank account until the money ran out. They'd mostly been living on his money.

When she wasn't sleeping or staring at the food perpetually lacking in savor, she was systematically cleaning every inch of the house. His family heirlooms included many carvings that needed dusting and polishing with Q-tips. For this she was thankful.

A pedestrian walkway ran past her garden, part of the scenic route circumventing the city whose fringe sheltered her shell of a home. A street musician would sometimes set up somewhere along the path, the pickings good enough to make this an unsurprising occurrence, but insufficiently generous to make it commonplace.

So it was with mild notice that she observed haunting flute music drifting through her window two weeks into her self-imposed confinement. At least she thought it was a flute. The earthiness of the sound suggested an instrument older than a hollow, silvery reed of the classical symphony.

The music continued through the dark, helping her sleep more easily than Since That Day, and still continued after she woke. She hoped the music came from multiple flautists taking it in turns and they were dressed warmly. Autumn frost chilled the nights.

After dressing she looked out in her garden and realized that, in her neglect, her lost one's prize chrysanthemums had withered. It made her catch her breath, the guilt-bile rising to the back of her tongue. She stumbled out to the garden, enclosed by a four-foot tall wooden fence, and kneeled at the roots of the shrubbery she had wronged. "I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry."

She heard quavering, questioning note, looked up, and saw a flute-man. He had a dark, coppery skin similar to her own, the shade that made her think she could be part Native American, although she knew nothing about her heritage. The hospital where someone left her infant self was near a Hopi reservation. She had been sent to the nearest orphanage not suffering from overcrowding, several states away, and had intentionally avoided learning about the culture most likely to be the one that abandoned her.

The rest of this man didn't fit any other model she could think of. His long hair shot out from the back of his head in gelled curves down towards his shoulder blades, sort of like a more subdued Sonic Hedgehog in dark brown, or a marine creature striking a defensive posture. On most people such a style would look ridiculous, but it seemed as integrally a part of his head as his arched eyebrows and lips like two brushstrokes from a master painter.

"I'm a little…emotionally off," she croaked, her voice rusty from days of nonuse.

He smiled and played a pleasant three-note rill on his instrument, carved from wood and held directly under the mouth rather than to the side.

In the shadow of a nearby tree, his form, a head taller than hers, seemed to have a hump protruding from the shoulders to the small of his back. When he stepped closer it turned out to be a leather pack. His other adornments were a necklace of beaten silver, a single turquoise earring, and a pictograph tattoo of a dancing ram curving around the lower edge of his left eye. He was barefoot.

Jenny cleared her throat and spoke slightly louder, more like normal talking. "I wanted to thank you for your playing. It comforted me."

He took the flute in one hand and touched the faded chrysanthemum. Then raised his eyebrows.

"Oh, do you not talk?" she asked.

He merely smiled again. His dark-eyed gaze made her feel a need to fill the silence, saying more than she had intended to.

"You see, my husband passed a - oh, for God's sake, why the euphemism? He died. He's dead. He's gone. And I was so wrapped up in my own weepfest and breakdown that I killed the only living thing I had to remind myself of him."

The flute man reached over the fence and lightly touched her belly, making a sound like, "Hm?"

"Everyone thinks so, but no. That - that died too. I don't know how I'll tell them."

He smelled of pine, not the artificial air freshener scent, but the heady adrenaline-booster when stepping into an old-growth forest, where you feel like you can breathe and breathe forever. Somewhere between her first gasp and first howl of anguish he ended up on her side of the fence, holding her and letting her tears stain his ragged, burnt-orange shirt. His arms felt warm and sinewy.

As she calmed down, she gently pried herself away. "Thank you, um, sir. But I won't trouble you with my grief."

He held up his index finger, slung off his pack onto the ground, and pulled out a handful of dark, rich soil. Why on earth would a street musician carry a bag full of loam? He spread it around the base of the chrysanthemums and played a rapid cacophony on his flute when he finished. Then, before she was done wondering - if she ever would be - he vaulted back over the fence and disappeared in the downpour that had sprung down from nowhere. There hadn't been any clouds a moment ago.

She tried not to think about the implications of these events as she nibbled on her friends' gifts and scrubbed the same spots over six times by way of recreation. In a locked drawer in the bedroom she never entered now - these days she slept on the couch so the emptiness next to her would be less evident - lay baby clothes, pacifiers, bottles. It was only one of many locked, for-the-moment-abandoned drawers and cupboards, even one whole closet.

Photo albums. Wedding gifts still unwrapped, too perplexingly beautiful to know how to use. His shoes. His clothes. His suitcase. His high school chess champion trophy. Off-limits. Abandoned. Do Not Pass Go; Do Not Collect 200.

If this went on for much longer, the kitchen floor would become so shiny she'd need protective goggles. The thing that stuck out most was that before, when the world had a sun, when there were such things as smiles, she'd hated housework. She'd found it demeaning. She'd been a career go-getter, solving the energy crisis, not some agoraphobic maid who would eventually start converting the house into gingerbread and expand the oven to fit small children.

Jenny collapsed asleep in the shower, bottle of Windex and scrubbing brush still clutched in her hands. When she woke the next morning, stiff and with soap in her clothes, she realized the flute was playing again.

Dressed-brushed-poured-a-cup-of-coffee…once outside, finally, she stopped breathing for a few seconds. The chrysanthemums were in full, red bloom. And she was certain they had formerly been white. They weren't fresh-cut flowers taped to dead stalks, either. She checked. Either the entire bush had been removed and replaced without her noticing, or this flute man was even stranger than he looked.

There he stood at the edge of the path, playing with his eyes shut. His clothes looked the same as the day before, the baggy cargo pants full of orange dust, even though that didn't match the geology of the nearby area. He saw her from the corner of his eye and sprang over.

"Did you do that?" she asked.

He nodded.

"Why?"

He made a motion of tears rolling down his cheeks.

"Thank you." She wouldn't quibble about the color change. It would be like one of the Sermon on the Mount audience members complaining that the miraculous fish was a high-mercury species, or that the loaves were slightly burned. "Um, how did you do it? I realize that's a stupid question to ask someone who doesn't talk -"

He shook his head.

"Oh, you do talk? Then why not now?"

He opened his mouth and made talking gestures, then pointed at her and waved his hands.

"You mean, you could talk but I wouldn't understand it?"

He smiled and nodded.

"But you understand me."

Nodded.

"Was what you did, was that, um, was that magic?"

Then he laughed. It had an echoing sound to it, like down into a canyon, and had all the life and light of a perfect summer's day.

"I guess it was another stupid question," Jenny murmured, turning away. She didn't get very far, for he was on her side of the fence again, grasping her arm. It didn't scare her - what could happen that was worse than what had already near-destroyed her? She was just confused.

He held up his index finger again and repeated the motions he had with the enchanted soil. This time, though, he pulled out a small, cheap, Mp3 player and handed it to her. It had only one earbud, which she put in.

She made sure to sit when she heard the first word, because she knew she wouldn't have been able to remain standing as the message continued. It was her husband. "Hey, Jenny-Jen."

"Terry?" She knew it was just a recording. She blurted it out anyway.

"I know this is going to be hard for you to believe, but please try," the voice continued. "I know what happened when I died. You lost the baby. I can't imagine how hard it is for you. I…well…this person who gave you this isn't an ordinary guy. I'm not quite sure what he is, but apparently something in your ancestry means I could ask him a favor. Whatever you need, whatever you feel ready for - you can. He'll do it for you. And it's what I want. Keep living, Jenny-Jen. I'm okay. Things don't hurt you on the other side. You will be okay too."

The flute-man took the Mp3 player from her limp fingers, putting it back on his bag. He knelt beside her, took both her hands between his callused ones, and kissed them.

"You came from wherever the dead go," she murmured, staring at the ground. "You go back and forth."

He cupped her chin in one palm, making her look him in the eyes of sincerity and a morality only roughly analogous to that which she'd lived by, permission to do what would shock her neighbors, rules that apply to gods rather than mortals.

She stood, taking him by the hand, and as if in some vision or fancy led him into the darkened house.

What followed went in a blur of silence from him but for the creaking of a dusty master bed, only soft sounds from her; pictures of deer, spidery rocks, suns, moons working their way across his chest and back; flute music all around though he didn't touch his own instrument, too busy touching other things; pressure and heat and encapsulation as she sobbed, sighed, and slightly, ever so slightly smiled. When so close, when holding on by every means possible, he had the aroma of desert after rain.

In her following dream, she saw red rocks eroded by wind, frost, and rivers. Birch trees white of bark and black of limb-stump. Conifers spreading up valley walls and onto plateaus like a green flood of eons. Petrified wood turned agate and feldspar from ancient death that had rendered it eternal. All under a sky so blue and far away that the sun shouted across the abyss just to reach the sparse life, to stir life into immense-eared jackrabbits and bring trout to the surface for worship.

Opening her eyes from this, she was alone. Pulling on clothes and peeking out the window, she saw every flower Terry had ever planted, even some he never had, was in full bloom, whether or not it was in its proper season.

On the dining table lay a manila envelope, strangely heavy, which turned out to contain a card and several lumps of what looked like solid gold. In a very pained, illiterate-looking scrawl were four words: "for child mor coming". Instead of a signature was a picture.

Jenny ran to the bathroom and pulled out a morning-after pregnancy test she had never gotten around to throwing away. The result caused her to give a very unladylike whoop.

No sooner had she disposed of the evidence that the doorbell rang, her friend as usual dropping off new supplies. This time Jenny opened the door.

"Thank you for helping me out during this tough time, Gabrielle," she said to her amazed friend. "Would you like to come in?"

Gabrielle wrapped her arms around her, tearing up. "I've been so worried about you."

They drank coffee together, talking and crying, and only forty minutes later did Jenny remember to show her the picture, carefully obscuring the words on the card. "Do you know what this is?"

It was a stylized silhouette of a dancing flute player, with a hump on his back, three curves of hair from the back of his head, and a prodigious limb that must have symbolized a phallus.

"You don't know this?" Gabrielle asked. "I mean; this is closer to the traditional depiction."

Jenny tracked down her birthplace and birth mother, proving that she did indeed come from a Hopi reservation, and had in her family tree the closest thing still existing of shamanic lineage.

"It's the emasculated version that's become a symbol of the Southwest."

The girl was born nine months later, and had Terry's green eyes. Jenny didn't ask how. The gold kept coming, but later to a postal box only Jenny knew of.

"He's a fertility god."

She went back to work at the wind farm - which had an excellent day care center - and met a new employee, who loved gardening too. For their honeymoon, they visited Bryce Canyon, the Grand Canyon, the Delicate Arches, and the family that had given Jenny up because her mother was too young and scared. They had always wondered where she went and hoped she had a better life than theirs. They were delighted by five-year-old Coco.

"Kokopelli."