No ties at all for Marmalade who cut them way back when the railroad went south and her words tookthe last train out before the whistle died out and Marmalade-sweet Marmalade was mute. Three years, seven months, two days plus morning since, and Marmalade is mute as thick jam, as pudding, as a stopped watch, even now.
         It wasn't all grief's fault about Marmalade. Though grief was an accomplice to all the bad weather. Whether she'd turned round and round those bushes with the old miner's daughter, Clementine, in the pretty day, pretty day of fall colored apple wine, purple leaf and burning orange air; and whether or not they fell down and kept falling until only Marmalade got back up, is no concern of grief's.
         Now, the tracks have gone rusty and the train's stopped running. Two girls went spinning in the cider-wind of autumn, two girls went down in the fall field outside a once-upon-mining-town and one girl stood up.
         Here's where memory came apart at the seams for Marmalade. Where everyone tells her there was no train, no severed girl, just some secret water and some foam and ruby lips gone chalky-grey.  Marmalade crawled away from the waterside tracks and the crushed girl and the drowned girl and the sobbing miner and the way you don't forget that day just keep living and living it.  The spinning to dizziness.  The laughter.  The blurry autumn everywhere. The train whistle. The stumbling girl. The falling, the fall.
         Touch death early and its lavender lips shush you some. There'll be more of the same. One minute and the world goes lopsided. One minute plus a scream and the bearing down and the crushed bones that aren't yours but feel achy when it rains and the rainwater reminds you. The rainwater that washes you in fall afternoon memories, washes over you and never makes you come clean. There are bath houses forming even now in the quietest part of your mind. There are water-witchers out divining and they’re closing in on you.
         It's a cruel world, Marmalade's mama, said, so sorry you had to see it, Baby. So sorry, truly am. But it keeps spinning this way, you may as well ready yourself. This world keeps spinning kind of drunk-like, kind of wobbly, spinning sad threads off its little wheel, weaves you a tapestry of sorry days and good days and they all tangle if they're too loose, unravel if you pull too tight, ache sometimes on a rainy day. And all the days sometimes they feel rainy. All the rainy days collect like seepage like underwater wells in the silly putty of your mind. They pick up pictures—funny paper people—and they stay until you stretch them out and warp them and then smear them all away.  Dreadful sorry all the same.