Salvage The Bones Quotes

Perhaps it’s true that things can change in a day. That a few dozen hours can affect the outcome of whole lifetimes. And that when they do, those few dozen hours, like the salvaged remains of a burned house—the charred clock, the singed photograph, the scorched furniture—must be resurrected from the ruins and examined. Preserved. Accounted for. Little events, ordinary things, smashed and reconstituted. Imbued with new meaning. Suddenly they become the bleached bones of a story.

it is the way that all girls who only know one boy move. Centered as if the love that boy feels for them anchors them deep as a tree's roots, holds them still as the oaks, which don't uproot in hurricane wind. Love as certainty.

And I get up because it is the only thing I can do.

In every one of the Greeks' mythology tales, there is this: a man chasing a woman, or a woman chasing a man. There is never a meeting in the middle.

I will not let him see until none of us have any choices about what can be seen, what can be avoided, what is blind, and what will turn us to stone.

What's done in the dark always comes to the light.

And it was easier to let him keep on touching me than ask him to stop, easier to let him inside than to push him away, easier than hearing him ask me, "Why not?" It was easier to keep quiet and take it than to give him an answer.

I realized that if I was going to assume the responsibility of writing about my home, I needed narrative ruthlessness. I couldn't dull the edges and fall in love with my characters and spare them. Life does not spare us.

To give life...is to know what's worth fighting for. And what's love.

Would a human egg let itself be seen?

I will tie the glass and stone with string, hang the shards above my bed, so that they will flash in the dark and tell the story of Katrina, the mother that swept into the Gulf and slaughtered. Her chariot was a storm so great and black the Greeks would say it was harnessed to dragons. She was the murderous mother who cut us to the bone but left us alive, left us naked and bewildered as wrinkled newborn babies, as blind puppies, as sun-starved newly hatched baby snakes. She left us a dark Gulf and salt burned land. She left us to learn to crawl. She left us to salvage. Katrina is the mother we will remember until the next mother with large, merciless hands, committed to blood, comes.

I can see her, chin to chest, straining to push Junior out, and Junior snagging on her insides, grabbing hold of what he caught on to try to stay inside her, but instead he pulled it out with him when he was born.

Seeing him broke the cocoon of my rib cage, and my heart unfurled to fly.

China. She will return, standing tall and straight, the milk burned out of her. She will look down on the circle of light we have made in the Pit and she will know that I have kept watch, that I have fought. China will bark and call me sister. In the star-suffocated sky, there is a great waiting silence. She will know that I am a mother.

And then I get up because it is the only thing I can do. I step out of the ditch and brush the ants off because it is the only thing I can do. I follow Randall around the house because it is the only thing I can do; if this is strength, if this is weakness, this is what I do. I hiccup, but tears still run down my face. After Mama died, Daddy said, What are you crying for? Stop crying. Crying ain’t going to change anything. We never stopped crying. We just did it quieter. We hid it. I learned how to cry so that almost no tears leaked out of my eyes, so that I swallowed the hot salty water of them and felt them running down my throat. This was the only thing that we could do. I swallow and squint through the tears, and I run.

My voice sounds like I have a cold, all the mucus from my crying lodged in my nose. A train, Mama said. Camille came, and the wind sounded like trains.

the air that had been still before swoops and tunnels through the clearing, raising dust, making the boys close their eyes. Maybe Daddy is right; maybe Katrina is coming for us.

But the wind grabs my voice up and snatches it out and over the pines, and drops it there to die.

There is a movement behind my breast that feels like someone has turned a hose on full blast, and the water that has been baking in the pump in the summer heat floods out, scalding. This is love, and it hurts.

If the scrapes were on the front of our knees, she would put our dirty feet in the middle of her chest to clean the wounds, and we could feel her heart beating, strong as the thud of the ground when we walked, through our soles.

I miss her so badly I have to swallow salt, imagine it running like lemon juice into the fresh cut that is my chest, feel it sting.

The very thing that distinguishes us both is that I wouldn't hesitate to choose you in every lifetime, but you wouldn't even choose me in this one and although I gave you my flesh and bones, I know I cannot love you into loving me. So there you are overflowing with my love and here I am pleading for a droplet of yours or whatever I could salvage. But there must come a time where you recognize that to grieve someone hurts a lot less than forcing them to be a part of you. And I know I should not beg for love but just once I wanted for someone to be afraid of losing me.

Vines catch my arms, my head; we tear through until we break out into the clearing before the fence, the field, the barn, the house, and I drop to my knees, and Randall leans back as if he would fall, both of us breathing hard, looking wet and newly born.

Medea kills her brother. In the beginning, she is known by her nephew, who tells the Argonauts about her, for having power, for helping her family, just like I tried to help Skeet on the day China first got sick from the Ivomec. But for Medea, love makes help turn wrong.

This baby got plenty of daddies. - Esch

There is laughter, shrill calls. Everyone is flirting, saying in nudges and jokes and blushing what they would do in private.

And then she would put her hand over the bird’s face like she was hiding it from seeing something, and then she would grab and twist. Break the neck. Slice the head off on the stump.

We on our backs staring at the stars above, Talking about what we going to be when we grow up, I said what you wanna be? She said, “Alive.” —OUTKAST, “DA ART OF STORYTELLIN’ (PART I),” AQUEMINI

I will tie the glass and stone with string, hang the shards above my bed, so that they will flash in the dark and tell the story of Katrina, the mother that swept into the Gulf and slaughtered. Her chariot was a storm so great and black the Greeks would say it was harnessed to dragons. She was the murderous mother who cut us to the bone but left us alive, left us naked and bewildered as wrinkled newborn babies, as blind puppies, as sun-starved newly hatched baby snakes. She left us a dark Gulf and salt-burned land. She left us to learn to crawl. She left us to salvage. Katrina is the mother we will remember until the next mother with large, merciless hands, committed to blood, comes.

Junior, stop being orner.” It’s what Mama used to say to us when we were little, and I say it to Junior out of habit. Daddy used to say it sometimes, too, until he said it to Randall one day and Randall started giggling, and then Daddy figured out Randall was laughing because it sounded like ‘horny’. About a year ago I figured out what it was supposed to be after coming across its parent on the vocabulary list for my English class with Miss Dedeaux: ‘ornery’. It made me wonder if there were other words Mama mashed like that. They used to pop up in my head sometime when I was doing the stupidest things: ‘tetrified’ when I was sweeping the kitchen and Daddy came in dripping beer and kicking chairs. ‘Belove’ when Manny was curling pleasure from me with his fingers in mid-swim in the pit. ‘Freegid’ when I was laying in bed in November, curled to the wall like I was going to burrow into another cover or I was making room for a body to lay behind me to make me warm.

Away from the Pit, the pine trees reach skyward, their green-needled tops stand perfectly still. Once in a while, they shiver in the breeze that moves across their tops. They seem to nod to something that I cannot hear, and I wonder if it is the hum of José out in the Gulf, singing to himself.

starts with the lowliest petty bourgeois in financial straits and extends through one level of poverty to another, to the lowest depths of society, right down to those two beings with whom all the material things of civilization end up: the sewer-man who sweeps up the sludge, and the rag-and-bone man who salvages the rubbish.

Darkness surrounded her, suffocated her. She tried to pierce it, but her eyes could find no hint of light. Nothing that would help her escape this prison. Weight pressed down upon her, heavy enough to crush her bones. And perhaps it had. There was no part of her that didn’t hurt so much that she wanted to howl with it. But when she opened her mouth, dirt and dust tried to choke her. Cold. Pain. Silence. No hope. Then a voice came to her, burrowing down through the soil and coiling around her. “When love,” a woman began to sing softly, “into my dreams was creeping. I gave my heart into your keeping.” Pure ecstasy. How she needed that voice, that presence to alleviate the darkness and pain and salvage her sanity. Tears welled in her eyes as she let the soft song embrace her. Her breath hitched.

Randall and Junior and I have been sitting in the yard for the past hour or so, jobs done; the house is too dark, too hot. It is a closed fist. Junior had been playing with an old extension cord, using it like a rope. He'd kept tying it to trees and twirling the cord like a jump rope. The tree was his partner, but he had no one to jump in the middle. Finally Randall untied the cord and I walked over and grabbed the other end. While the sky was darkening, the sun shining more fitfully through the clouds, we turned the cord for Junior and he jumped in the dust.

There is so much I want to tell you, Ma. I was once foolish enough to believe knowledge would clarify, but some things are so gauzed behind layers of syntax and semantics, behind days and hours, names forgotten, salvaged and shed, that simply knowing the wound exists does nothing to reveal it... When I first started writing, I hated myself for being so uncertain, about images, clauses, ideas, even the pen or journal I used. Everything I wrote began with maybe and perhaps and ended with I think or I believe. But my doubt is everywhere, Ma. Even when I know something to be true as bone I fear the knowledge will dissolve, will not, despite my writing, feel real. I'm breaking us apart again so I could carry us somewhere else--where exactly I'm not sure.

The storm, it has a name now. Like the worst, she’s a woman

For some reason I see Skeetah when I blink, Skeetah kneeling next to China, always kneeling, always stroking and loving and knowing her. Skeetah’s face when he stood across from Rico, when he told China, Make them know. I am on him like China.

I scrub, wipe like I could wipe the love of Manny, the hate of Manny, Manny, away. And then I get up because it is the only thing I can do. I step out of the ditch and brush the ants off because it is the only thing I can do. I follow Randall around the house because it is the only thing I can do; if this is strength, if this is weakness, this is what I do. I hiccup, but tears still run down my face. After Mama died, Daddy said, What are you crying for? Stop crying. Crying ain’t going to change anything. We never stopped crying. We just did it quieter. We hid it. I learned how to cry so that almost no tears leaked out of my eyes, so that I swallowed the hot salty water of them and felt them running down my throat. This was the only thing that we could do. I swallow and squint through the tears, and I run.

I can remember her saying it.’ He stops rubbing China, leans forward to put his elbows on his knees, rubs his hands together, looks away. ‘But I can’t remember her voice’ he says. ‘I know the exact words she said, can see us sitting there by her lap, but all I can hear is my voice saying it, not hers.’ I want to say that I know her voice. I want to open my mouth and have her voice slide out of me like an impression, to speak Mama alive for him as I hear her. But I can’t.

I’m sorry’ Daddy says. I want to say, Yes. Or I know. Or I’m sorry, too. But I squeak, small as a mouse in the room. Wonder where the baby will sleep, wonder if it will lay curled up in the bed with me. If I will teach Junior to give it a bottle, the way Daddy taught us. He is old enough now. ‘How long has it been?’ Daddy asks. ‘I don’t know…’ 'When we can, we need to find out… ‘ ‘Yes,’ I say, facing him… Junior will feed the baby, sit on the bed with the pillows on both sides to support his arms. He will sit still long enough for that. ‘Make sure everything’s okay.’ I nod. ‘So nothing will go wrong

that the radiation alone has not killed the cancer, this should be clear long before your PSA level reaches that point. However, it’s worth repeating that the consensus panel that developed the Phoenix definition (nadir + 2) advises, “Physicians should use individualized approaches to managing young patients with slowly rising PSA levels who initially achieved a very low nadir and who might be a candidate for salvage local therapies.” If your PSA level continues to rise, what should you do? To determine whether you are a candidate for surgery after radiation, you will need to have a prostate biopsy to confirm that the cancer recurrence is local; you will also need a bone scan and CT scan or MRI of the abdomen and pelvis to rule out the possibility that cancer has spread to distant sites. The guidelines above (see What Should I Do If My PSA Comes Back After Surgery?) may one day be adapted for men who have failed radiation treatment, but the

A large Rottweiler tied to a fencepost at the far end of the salvage yard pricked its ears up and growled, but only for a second. The sound, the terrible screeching, caused the dog to cower against the yard’s security fence and whimper like a scared pup. Beneath the car, the rat lay on its back, legs kicking furiously, clawing at the air, a high-pitched squeal escaping its open maw, much too loud to be produced by its tiny lungs. Its head lolled from side to side and its tongue flapped about like a meaty whip. Beneath the rat’s coarse hair, bones were snapping, rearranging, fusing. Muscles were flexing, ripping, building. Cells ruptured and then re-formed. DNA strands resequenced, and resequenced again. Something was being born, at the same time something else was dying.

GOAT HOUR GOSPEL (SUCH SALVAGE) BY MARK WAGENAAR   Just as the evening’s about to move on, they appear, not as the apparitional deer— here, & gone in the next moment, without a sound—but one by one, bumbling through briar, chewing through poison ivy, sniffing at trees. A slow procession walking beneath elms & birches that hold up the last light. And you’re alone with the traces of things, the news in front of you: the crooked skeleton of Richard III was dug up from a parking lot, humpbacked, once buried in his boots & battlefield wounds. Nearby a lost river has been uncovered, & coughed up its mouthful of Roman skulls. No relic is safe, it seems, from an invisible tide that presses them upward. Sometimes it’s not the loss that hurts but the indignities of the discovery. And yet beside the diggers & builders of new things is this mangy congregation, pushing through the scrub without a trail or blueprint or direction. Their dirty white fur shines a little in this late, lost hour. They bleat as they shamble & piss on each other without warning, or maybe as a warning, or in greeting. They’ll eat anything—tin can, T-shirt, canvas sack, bones of animals & kings, & carry them awhile. And so do we: each night, across the country, people turn up at hospitals unable to speak, for the needle or nail lodged in their throats. They’re unable to explain why, but we know— that desperate mix of need & panic that can drive us to keep something safe for good. These dearest items take your words & leave them luminous, radiolucent, shining on the X-ray, like this swallowed ring: a ghostly eclipse. Small comfort to share an appetite with these goats, this dishevelled lot. But a comfort, too, to know that some things will be saved from the soil, rescued from time’s indignities, if only for a little while, & by these scruffy reliquaries, on the other side of the valley now, flickering slightly as they near the vanishing point of the timberline. And we might call such salvage mercy . And it must be even for the undeserving, for those of us who didn’t live right, or live best. Whatever that means. Mercy will find us, even when we fail to recognize it, when we least expect it.

... It truly didn't matter if my flesh and bone never returned; the treasures of life could still be salvaged if I was brave enough to look.

In fact, it is unlikely that all the men on the island went in search of food and water. While some went foraging, others would have set about building rough shelters, thatched with palm fronds, above the high-water mark. At the same time, sailors, probably under the watchful eye of Sir George Somers, made repeated trips to the grounded vessel, salvaging anything that might be of service. Planks above the waterline were torn from the ship’s oaken frames and hauled ashore along with hatches and any undamaged spars that could be removed and metal fittings and canvas and cordage and tools and even books and the important charts from Newport’s cabin and, of course, the instructions and a copy of the new Virginia charter given to Gates by the officers of the Virginia Company in London. Somehow the heavy ship’s bell was hauled ashore, as were several heavy cooking kettles and at least one of the smallest cannon. Within days, though, the salvage operation came to an end as the Sea Venture slipped beneath the waves, to rest where her bones still lie, between the two coral outcroppings that trapped her. Even though the survivors must have known the ship was lost once it struck the reef,

She is calm and self-possessed as a housecat; it is the way that all girls who only know one boy move. Centered as if the love that boy feels for them anchors them deep as a tree’s roots, holds them still as the oaks, which don’t uproot in hurricane wind. Love as certainty.

If I took care of it, he would never know, I think, never know, and then maybe it would give him time. Time to what? I push. Be different. Love me.

The only thing that’s ever been easy for me to do, like swimming through water, was sex when I started having it. I was twelve.

And it was easier to let him keep on touching me than ask him to stop, easier to let him inside than push him away, easier than hearing him ask me, Why not? It was easier to keep quiet and take it than to give him an answer.

I thought that one day we would have sex, but he never came for me that way; since the boys always came for me, I never tried to have sex with him.

I put my hands in my pockets, and the pregnancy test I ripped out of the box and tucked into the waistband of my shorts when I wandered away from Skeetah on a trip to the bathroom scratches my side.

I know something’s wrong; for weeks I’ve been throwing up every other day, always walking around feeling like someone’s massaging my stomach, trying to push the food up and out of me. Some months when I eat a little less because I’m tired of ramen or potatoes, I’m irregular. But the sickness and the vomiting make me think I should get a test, that and me being two months irregular, and the way I wake up every morning with my abdomen feeling full, fleshy and achy and wet, like the blood’s going to come running down any minute—only it doesn’t.

all the times I’ve had sex, and it seems like every memory has gold and silver condom wrappers, like chocolates covered in golden foil to look like coins, that the boys leave behind once they get up, once we pull apart. This is what I’m thinking when I see the woman laying half in the road, half in the grass.

Two lines means that you are pregnant. You are pregnant. I am pregnant. I sit up and curl over my knees, rub my eyes against my kneecaps. The terrible truth of what I am flares like a dry fall fire in my stomach, eating all the fallen pine needles. There is something there.

I have dreamed about kissing him. Around three years ago, I saw him having sex with a girl. He and Randall had talked her into coming back to the Pit with them when Daddy was out, and I heard them all laughing when they passed underneath the window. I followed them into the woods. When they got

The house is a drying animal skeleton, everything inside that was evidence of living salvaged over the years.

Because everyone else was crying, I clung like a monkey to Mama, my legs and arms wrapped around her softness, and I cried, love running through me like a hard, blinding summer rain. And then

Mama died, and there was no one left for me to hold on to.

The girls say that if you’re pregnant and you take a month’s worth of birth control pills, it will make your period come on. Say if you drink bleach, you get sick, and it will make what will become the baby come out. Say if you hit yourself really hard in the stomach, throw yourself on the metal edge of a car and it hits you low enough to call bruises, it could bring a miscarriage.

For though I’m small, I know many things, And my body is an endless eye Through which, unfortunately, I see everything. —GLORIA FUERTES, “NOW

The storm, it has a name now. Like the worst, she’s a woman. Katrina.” “There’s another storm?” Randall asks.

Katrina has made landfall in Florida … miles from Miami.” It is the local news.

I know that wink, that grin. He smiled like that when he was done when we had sex for the last time about a year ago, when he was wiping himself, turned away from me; he threw that smile like salt over the shoulder. I grip the seam where the windshield joins the hood, and I pull myself away from him so that we are no longer touching. I do not like his smile.

And then I think that Manny saw me, and that he turned away from me, from what I carry, pulling his burnt gold face from my hands, and then I am crying

again for what I have been, for what I am, and for what I will be, again.

suddenly there is a great split between now and then, and I wonder where the world where that day happened has gone, because we are not in it.

the story of Katrina, the mother that swept into the Gulf and slaughtered. Her chariot was a storm so great

and black the Greeks would say it was harnessed to dragons. She was the murderous mother who cut us to the bone but left us alive, left us naked and bewildered as wrinkled newborn babies, as blind puppies, as sun-starved newly hatched baby snakes. She left us a dark Gulf and salt-burned land. She left us to learn to crawl. She left us to salvage. Katrina is the mother we will remember until the next mother with large, merciless hands, committed to blood, comes.

We will sit with him here, in the strange, insect-silent dark. We will sit until we are sleepy, and then we will remain until our legs hurt, until Junior falls asleep in Randall’s arms, his weak neck lolling off Randall’s elbow. Randall will watch Junior and Big Henry will watch me and I will watch Skeetah, and Skeetah will watch none of us. He will watch the dark, the ruined houses, the muddy appliances, the tops of the trees that surround us whose leaves are dying for lack of roots. He will feed the fire so it will blaze bright as a lighthouse. He will listen for the beat of her tail, the padding of her feet in mud.

Who the daddy?” Big Henry asks. There is no blazing fire to his eyes, no cold burning ice like Manny’s. Only warmth, like the sun on the best fall days when the few leaves that will turn are starting and the air is clear and cloudless. “It don’t have a daddy,” I say.

You wrong,” Big Henry says. He looks away when he says it, out to the gray Gulf. There is a car out there in the shallows of the water. The top gleams red. “This baby got a daddy, Esch.” He reaches out his big soft hand, soft as the bottom of his feet probably, and helps me stand. “This baby got plenty daddies.

If it is a boy, I will name it after Skeetah. Jason. Jason Aldon Batiste.

If it is a girl, I will name her after my mother: Rose. Rose Temple Batiste.

She’s pregnant.” Skeetah points. Daddy’s face shuts, and he pushes.

Daddy saw it, that second before he pushed me. My big T-shirt and my shorts fitting me like a second skin, sodden with water. Where I used to be all sharp elbows and thighs straight as pines and a stomach like a paved road, my wet clothes show the difference.

Is it him?” he whispered. I nodded, looked down at the ground. “I knew you had a crush on him, but—” Randall cleared his throat. “I didn’t think he’d do anything about it.” “I wanted to,” I said. “I’m going to beat the shit out of him,” Randall said, the words whistling out of him.

When Mama first explained to me what a hurricane was, I thought that all the animals ran away, that they fled the storms before they came, that they put their noses to the wind days before and knew. That maybe they stuck their tongues out, pink and warm, to taste, to make sure. That the deer looked at their companions and leapt.

Mandatory evacuation. Hurricane making landfall tomorrow. If you choose to stay in your home and have not evacuated by this time, we are not responsible. You have been warned. And these could be the consequences of your actions. There is a list.

The first hurricane that I remember happened when I was nine, and of the two or three we get every year, it was the worst I’ve ever been in. Mama let me kneel next to the chair she’d dragged next to the window. Even then, our boards were mismatched, and there were gaps we could peer out of, track the progress of the storm in the dark. The battery-operated radio told us nothing practical, but the yard did: the trees bending until almost breaking,

There is a movement behind my breast that feels like someone has turned a hose on full blast, and the water that has been baking in the pump in the summer heat floods out, scalding.

This is love, and it hurts. Manny never looks at me.

To give life”—Skeetah bends down to China, feels her from neck to jaw, caresses her face like he would kiss her; she flashes her tongue—“is to know

what’s worth fighting for. And what’s love.” Skeetah rubs down her sides, feels her ribs.

I want him to grip my hand like he grips the dark beams over his head, to walk with me out of the shed and away from the Pit. To help me bear the sun. To hold me once he learns my secret. To be different.

Sometimes I wonder if Junior remembers anything, or if his head is like a colander, and the memories of who bottle-fed him, who licked his tears, who mothered him, squeeze through the metal like water to run down the drain, and only leave the present day, his sand holes, his shirtless bird chest, Randall yelling a him: the present washed clean of memory like vegetables washed clean of the dirt they grow in.

Reading poetry helps me to see the world differently, and I try to infuse my prose with figurative language, which goes against the trend in fiction. While I admire writers who are able to write with a vitality based on order and action, I work in a different vein. I often feel that if I can get the language just right, the language hypnotizes the reader.

Legherò i pezzi di vetro e mattone con lo spago e appenderò i frammenti sopra il letto, in modo che brillino nel buio e raccontino la storia di Katrina, la madre che è entrata nel golfo come una regina per portare la morte. Il suo carro era una tempesta terribile e nera, e i greci avrebbero detto che era trainato dai draghi. La madre assassina che ci ha feriti a morte e tuttavia ci ha lasciati vivi, nudi, stupefatti e raggrinziti come bimbi appena nati, come cuccioli ciechi, come serpentelli appena usciti dal guscio, affamati di sole. Ci ha lasciato un mare buio e una terra bruciata dal sole. Ci ha lasciati qui perché impariamo a camminare da soli. A salvare ciò che possiamo.

Lacey said the road would be long and difficult. That sounded about right, considering I was endeavoring to relearn how to be a person. I wanted to learn to be happy and strong and independent so I could support others instead of letting my own depression always take center stage. I wanted to learn how to be a better friend, partner, family member, to invest in permanent relationships. I wanted to be the kind of woman people didn’t leave. I had to find out what was salvageable, if I had good qualities underneath all of those layers of trauma and hurt and workaholism.

Nine hours of surgery to salvage his bladder so it might work half as well as it did, if infections do not consume him. His prostate cut from his thin boy body, seminal vesicles too, rendering him unable to know a certain intimacy but familiar with the incontinence of the old man he probably will never be, his injuries likely to shorten his life by at least two decades. If he survives the next breath. If he ever wakes. And this surgery came only after another that was more vital. Seventeen hours of delicate, intensive surgery on his lower spine, two cracked vertebrae fused together using bone from his hip, the shrapnel from a bullet lodged too close to his spinal cord to risk removal. His gallbladder gone, as well as a lymph node. Feet of small intestine excised, the lower lobe of his right lung damaged, leaving him with such diminished capacity that playing on the jungle gym will be tantamount to summiting Everest. My boy’s body parts incinerated somewhere in the bowels of the hospital. All this just his bodily damage. Who can know the damage to his soul and mind?

When Mama first explained to me what a hurricane was, I thought that all the animals ran away, that they fled the storms before they came, that they put their noses to the wind days before and knew...And maybe the bigger animals do. But now I think that other animals, like the squirrels and the rabbits, don't do that at all. Maybe the small don't run.

In Mythology, I am still reading about Medea and the quest for the Golden Fleece. Here is someone that I recognize. When Medea falls in love with Jason, it grabs me by the throat. I can see her. Medea sneaks Jason things to help him: ointments to make him invincible, secrets in rocks. She has magic, could bend the natural to the unnatural. But even with all her power, Jason bends her like a young pine in a hard wind; he makes her double in two. I know her.

After Mama died, Daddy said, What are you crying for? Stop crying. Crying ain’t going to change anything. We never stopped crying. We just did it quieter.

Make them know that even though they want to they can't live without you.

I listen for the boys and the dogs somewhere out in these woods, but all I can hear is the pine trees shushing each other, the oak bristling, the magnolia leaves hard and wide so that they sound like paper plates clattering when the wind hits them, this wind snapping before Katrina somewhere out there in the Gulf, coming like the quiet voice of someone talking before they walk through the doorway of a room.

The chickens have made their own plans for the storm; they have packed their eggs away, hidden them well. As Randall and Junior and I spread out underneath the oaks and the pines, hunting, Randall crouches down to Junior, and he tells him how Mama taught us to find eggs. Look but don’t look, she said. They’ll find you. You gotta wander and they’ll come. She’d leaned over like Randall, her strong hand soft on the back of my neck, steadying me like a dog. They’re usually brown and have some feathers stuck to them, she’d say, pointing. The eggs look that way because of the mama. Whatever color the mama is, that’s what color the egg is. Her lips were pink, and when she leaned over like that I could smell baby powder drifting from the front of her dress, see the mole-marked skin of her chest, the soft fall of her breasts down into her bra. Like me and you, she said. Like me and you. See? She smiled at me, and her eyelashes met her eyelashes like a Venus flytrap.