Joss

Joss wove through the crowd as the festival parade began. With practiced ease, she dipped her hand into bags and pockets fishing out wallets and pocketbooks, slipping the goods into her voluminous coat pockets. She was young, twelve years old, but she had been picking pockets since she was six and was one of the best, according to Doc, her modern-day Fagin. And like Oliver Twist Joss was an orphan who had been shuffled from house to house until she had been landed at Doc's place. She never focused on her marks, preferring to consider them as livestock. After working this side of Main Street she ducked into an alley and walked, with ease and without rushing; rushing would bring attention, Doc had taught her. Walk as if you had every right to be there. Down one alley and across Delaney, through the thinning crowd and into the drug store where she ducked into the restroom to examine her haul.

Three pocketbooks and two wallets. Joss played a game she made up, trying to glean what she could about the marks from the contents of their wallets. She looked at photographs and dry cleaning slips, lottery tickets, driver's licenses, and credit cards. There was not a lot of cash in the pocketbooks; In this age of plastic people didn't carry around much paper money. She was tucking the wallets back into her coat pockets when a photograph fell out of one of them. Joss picked it up and stared at it. The fine hair on her arms stood at attention and a crawling sensation made its way from the back of her neck up to the top of her head. The photograph showed a picture of a girl, a girl holding the bridle of a glossy red horse. The photograph showed Joss.

Impossible. Joss burst out of the stall and looked at herself in the mirror. Gray eyes, crooked mouth, wavy brown hair. She looked back down at the photograph of the girl with the horse. Gray eyes, crooked mouth, wavy brown hair. A chill made its way up Joss's spine. What was going on? She knew she had never even seen a horse, much less dressed in those fancy clothes. Her mind whirled. She tucked the photograph into the pocket of her jeans; she didn't want anyone, even Doc, to see it. What could it mean? Joss had no strange double life in which she was rich and had a horse. But the photograph was real and tangible, there in her pocket. Was there another Joss somewhere? Perhaps she had a twin. It was possible, she supposed. She knew nothing of her mother or birth or anything like that; Joss had been dropped off at a firehouse after birth. Was it possible? Did she have a sister? Or was something stranger going on?

Back out in the street, she scanned the crowd for the man whose wallet she had taken. A hand landed on her shoulder, and she looked up.

"Clare, where have you been? I've been looking for you." Jess looked up into warm brown eyes.

"Um..." she said.

A girl bounced up, a girl with gray eyes, crooked mouth, and wavy brown hair. "Daddy?"

Joss twisted out from under the man's hand and dashed down the street.

"Who was that?" Clare asked.

"I... don't know, Clarebear." replied her father as he watched the figure dash into an alley. "But I'm going to find out."