She was Jill once. That was the name the rhyme took. But no rhyme had ever asked her what happened after the vinegar and paper mended the crown of her head. No skipping rope song told how Jack — her Jack, her brother by bond if not by blood — had walked away from the well not with a limp, but with a silence that grew longer each year until it swallowed him whole.
Jack had died last spring. Not in the rhyme — in a hospital three states away, under a fluorescent light that buzzed like a trapped fly. Cirrhosis, the doctors said. Mae had sat beside him for the last hour. He opened his eyes once and said, “We never went back up, did we?” jack and jill mae winters
She set it on the wooden lid.