The town had a name once, but the name had been forgotten the way the dead are forgotten when there is no one left to remember them, and it existed now only in the memory of people who were too old to be remembering anything at all, people like Rev. Thomas Graham, who sat on his porch every evening and watched the heat rise from the Mississippi soil like a prayer answered by the wrong god.

He was seventy-three years old, and he had been seventy-three for seven years, ever since the fire, ever since the girl died, ever since the church came down and took with it not just the building and the hymnals and the wooden cross above the altar but the last thread of something that had held him together before that, something he refused to name and would never name because names had power and he did not want that power in his mouth.

The fire had been an accident. The coroner said so. The fire marshal said so. The insurance adjuster said so, with his clipboard and his careful language and his refusal to ask about the kerosene can that had been found three feet from the church door, the can that had belonged to Thomas Graham himself, which he had used to dampen the ground around the old oak tree in the churchyard, a tree that had been struck by lightning in the summer of nineteen sixty-one and split down the middle like a sinner split open by divine judgment.

But the girl, the girl named Mabel Duval, had been sleeping in the basement of the church, and the kerosene had found her room the way fire finds everything that will burn, and she had burned the way young girls burn when they have never seen fire before and do not know to run, and she had burned and Thomas Graham had stood on the porch of his cottage across the road and watched the orange light flickering through the church windows and he had known, he had known in his bones, in the marrow of his seven decades, that God was watching too, and that He was not pleased.

After that, the church was closed. The congregation scattered like birds startled from a feeder. The town moved on, as towns do, with their grocery stores and their barbershops and their quiet cruelties that were never spoken aloud but were understood by everyone who had grown up there, who knew which families carried which curses and which families were cursed with carrying the curses of other families.

But Thomas Graham did not move on. He stayed. He sat on his porch and he watched the heat rise from the soil and he thought about Mabel and the way she had burned and the way God had watched.

And then he built the shack.

It was small, ten by twelve feet, made from scavenged lumber and a roof of corrugated tin that sang in the rain like bones rattling in a coffin. He put a sign on it that read: Thomas Graham, Reading. No other title, no other qualification. Just his name and an action, a verb without an object, as if the reading would take care of itself, as if anyone who came to him would open their hand and he would see what had always been there, written not in the lines of the palm but in the weight of it, in the way it trembled or did not tremble, in the colour of the skin and the temperature of the blood beneath it.

He could not read palms. Not in any way that would satisfy a believer. But he could read people, had done so for seventy-three years, and the palm was just a door, and behind every door was a person, and behind every person was a history, and behind every history was a truth that could be spoken aloud or buried forever, depending on the weight of the hand that had come to knock at the door.

She came on a Tuesday, which was a slow day, but not slow enough to keep her away. The sky was the colour of a bruise, purple and yellow and green all at once, and the air was so thick that breathing felt like an act of charity, giving something to the atmosphere that it did not deserve.

She was dressed in white, but not the white of purity or innocence or any of the other lies that women wear like perfume. This was the white of丧服, of mourning, of a cousin who had been told that grief required a costume and had bought the right one from the only shop that still had white in stock, the fabric so fine and so cold that it made her look like a ghost who had not yet decided whether to haunt or to heal.

Her name was Claire Duval. She had come to him because the town had told her that Thomas Graham could see things, and she had come because she was looking for something and she did not know what it was but she knew that it was connected to Mabel, her cousin Mabel, who had died in a fire that was not an accident, connected to the kerosene can, connected to Thomas Graham, connected to the way she had dreamed about Mabel every night for the past seven years, Mabel burning and speaking in a language that Claire did not know but understood perfectly.

She sat in the shack and she opened her hand and Thomas Graham looked at it and what he saw was not the lines of the palm but the history of the blood, the genetic inheritance that flowed through her veins like a river carrying the silt of generations, the same instability that had taken Mabel, the same mental darkness that had eaten Mabel from the inside out until the fire was not an accident but an offering, a sacrifice made by a mind that had cracked and bled and could not tell the difference between holiness and destruction.

"You're a Duval," he said.

"Yes."

"So was Mabel."

"Yes."

"You dreamed about her."

She nodded. The white fabric of her dress rustled like wings.

"She speaks to me," she said. "In a language I don't know. But I understand every word."

Thomas Graham looked at her hand, at the pale skin, at the delicate bones, at the tremor in the thumb that was not fear but inheritance, the same tremor that Mabel had had, the same tremor that their grandmother had had, the same tremor that went back through the Duval line like a thread sewn by a blind needle, binding generation to generation, curse to curse, madness to madness, all of it carried in the blood, all of it flowing through Claire's veins like water flowing through a cracked pipe, leaking loss after loss after loss.

"There is nothing to read," he said. "But I can tell you what you already know. The madness, the darkness, the fire that lives inside your family like a second heart, beating in your chest right now, Claire Duval, beating and beating and beating, and one day it will burn you the way it burned Mabel, not with flames but with ideas, with visions, with the certainty that God is speaking to you and that the only way to answer is to build a pyre and light it and watch the world turn orange and beautiful and terrible."

She was crying. The white fabric of her dress was damp at the shoulders where the tears had fallen and been absorbed like prayers.

"What do I do?" she asked.

"What your family has always done," he said. "What you have always done. You carry it. You carry the fire and you carry the madness and you carry the weight of all the Duvals who came before you, and you carry it until the day when it carries you, and on that day, you will understand Mabel, and you will understand God, and you will understand that there is no difference between a saint and a sinner, only a difference in what they burn."

The storm came that night. It came all at once, the way Mississippi storms come, not with warning but with fury, the sky tearing open and the rain falling like judgement, the wind howling through the shack like a choir of the damned, and Thomas Graham sat in his cottage and listened to it and thought about the church, about Mabel, about Claire Duval in her white dress, about the fire that would come again, because it always comes again, because it is in the blood and the blood will not be denied, and the town would continue to forget and remember and forget and remember, and the Duvals would continue to burn, one generation at a time, a slow and holy conflagration that would never end.

He closed his eyes and in the darkness behind his eyelids, he saw Mabel, not burning, just sitting in the basement of the church, reading a book, her face peaceful and whole and alive, and he knew that this was the closest he would ever come to salvation, this vision of a girl who had died and would die again and would die again, not in fire but in memory, in the memory of a seventy-three-year-old man who had been seventy-three for seven years and would be seventy-three until the day he died, which would be another fire, another offering, another act of faith in a God who had never answered him but had never stopped watching.

Outside, the storm raged. The shack held. The church did not. The town forgot. The Duvals carried on.