eye to find the soul's wick flickering in the last of its shadows. She fans the darkness into light; cold ashes whirl away to memory, and the tip of the child's tongue drifts like a leaf to taste the sweet dust of wings fallen iridescent on her lips. They knew scarlet fever when they saw it, and they saw it on her neck and arms, could feel it in the pulse she gave off as she lay in fever on her bunk twisting the blanket to her face, a headache wishing her back to Dublin, to her own bed, her own window where the breeze brought the garden inside. In three days it would be her ears; in a week she would let go of her fourth winter, her parents' faces blurring away, her sisters' eyes turning into stars as she eased out of pain, wrapped in their blankets, surrounded by everything she'd touched, swirling with her in a weighted sack, to the floor of the Atlantic. II. JAMES EDWARD HANLEY They were told to return to steerage where they belonged, but stayed, the father's eyes ending any argument on deck; a tanner by trade, his hands were mostly leather; the arms, massive as country fence posts, curved around his family bent at the railing in prayer. In time, they asked for more blankets and took the children below, where they lay broken in the first grief they had ever known, their mother close to the father, speaking in whisper,