This One and Magic Life by Anne C. George Page A

out in the field one day baling hay and not a cloud in the sky and bam! A streak of lightning came out of nowhere and knocked him down. Near about electrocuted him, but it turned out all right. Anybody want anything else?” Mrs. Randolph gets up from the table.
    â€œNot a cloud in the sky?” Reese asks.
    â€œNot a one. My papa was with him and had to beat him on the chest.”
    â€œWhere did the lightning come from?” Dolly wants to know.
    â€œGod knows. Bless Rudy’s heart, though. He was the first of us children to go. Got it in his mind that if he went outside, lightning would hit him again. We all told him that was crazy. Finally talked him into going out.”
    Dolly is intrigued. “And lightning hit him again?”
    â€œOf course not. A bee stung him, though, and he went into some kind of shock. Died before we could get him to the hospital. He was my favorite brother, too. I don’t make any bones about it.” Mrs. Randolph begins to rinse the dishes. “Eat that fruit salad, Dolly. You need something in your stomach. You’re skinny as a rail.”
    Dolly is having trouble with one strawberry going down.
    â€œI knew a man got hit by lightning twice,” Reese says. “Both his arms looked like a zipper running up them.”
    Mrs. Randolph sits back down. She’s rubbing Jergen’s lotion on her hands. “Well, some people are just plain magnets, aren’t they?”
    Reese agrees. “God’s truth.”
    On TV Vicky is waking from surgery. She reaches toward her husband who offers her a huge strawberry. Dolly knows she needs to go rest.

SEVENTEEN
Daylilies
    AFTER YOU CROSS THE MISSISSIPPI LINE, ANY EXIT ALONG 1–10 will take you into bayou country. It stretches the width of the state, swampy, fertile. Hektor turns just past Pascagoula and heads inland through swamp grass almost as high as the truck. He crosses dozens of small bridges that span dark, unmoving streams. Beside him, May concentrates on the bottle of Dr Pepper into which she has poured a package of peanuts. Every time she turns it up, Hektor holds his breath. He has only seen the Heimlich maneuver on TV. Besides, by the time he stopped the car and got her out, it might be too late. “Please be careful,” he says. May smiles at him, puts her thumb over the bottle top, and shakes it. Foam and peanuts bubble up; she clamps her mouth over the bottle. Her cheeks swell like small balloons.
    â€œQuit that,” Hektor says.
    May burps and chews.
    â€œA lot of flying saucers land in here,” Hektor says.
    May looks at the grass, the stunted palms. “Why?”
    â€œI don’t know. You just see it all the time in thepaper. Two fishermen from Pascagoula said they got carried for a ride.”
    May looks at Hektor. “You don’t believe that, do you, Papa?”
    â€œNo. But I think the men believed it. Something happened to them out here that scared them nearly to death. I saw them on TV still shaking.” Hektor remembers how big the men’s eyes were, how they stuttered. “Never put any foreign substances in your body, May. Promise me.”
    â€œI promise.” May shakes the Dr Pepper again. Hektor sighs.
    They are entering an area of thin pine trees that lean away from the prevailing wind off the gulf. Not for the first time, Hektor thinks of the people who paved this road. There must be cottonmouth moccasins in here as big as boa constrictors. And alligators and mosquitoes and leeches that would grab you like they did Humphrey Bogart. He still wonders how they filmed that. If a flying saucer did land here it wouldn’t stand a chance.
    â€œThere are some cars up there,” May says. “Maybe it’s a wreck or something.”
    Hektor pulls to a stop behind a rusty Chevy pickup and gets out to see why the road is blocked. A woman is sitting in the cab crocheting. Hektor nods hello.
    â€œIt’s a gator,” she