Every Sunday, we kiss Mama Glynn’s portrait. One by one, we form a line, hands clasped and lean over to rub our lips on her cheek. The paint is fainter there, where we’d polished off the pigment. I’m still a level one, so I need to drag a stool up the dais and position it below to reach.

“What the hell is a bob-a-thon?” Karl asked, passing beneath the cross-stitched banner as he followed Janine to join the small crowd surrounding the barn. It was the usual set-up, a keg on ice and thudding music, but then he saw it—a water tank large enough for cattle, metal splotchy with pale lichen and blossoms of rust.

I have mixed feelings about you.

It was a library book, so that’s most certainly a point against you, but it was a book made of collages itself. It’s what Max Ernst might have done.

I am baffled by this image you left me though.

The ancient facade of the big house loomed grey and gleaming over the wild verdancy of Cyan’s demesne. The walls whistled, low and long, whenever the wind blew. Cyan had filled the house with imported brocade throws and beautiful rugs, but they did little to tame the toe-biting cold. The Berber carpet in the great room claimed the most space in my memory. It bore vivid saffron linework cutting through a field of oak leaf green, lit by the glowing blue screen of the immaculate console we’d all been forbidden to touch.

One evening there are simply strings. Suspended from the sky, undulating on the currents of the air. Thin, ethereal tentacles like pendulous orange nerves draped between skyscrapers. Moving on the wind, but not just on the wind. Searching, groping of their own will. Like maggots in the dark.

As the screen door slammed behind us, Momma called out a warning about swimming in the creek. “You’re likely to fall in and drown,” she said, “or get eat up by a cottonmouth.” She’d worried about snakes since I was six and she’d found me in the backyard hugging a rattler like a doll. “A miracle you didn’t get bit,” she’d told me over and over since. “Snake bites are mean; their poison seeps through your veins to your heart.”

The young woman is sacrificed to the sea monster. Rich in detail, they clad her in silks that expose her nakedness, rather than hide it. Silks diamoned with salt. Silks fresh and pink as cherry blossoms. Her hair is done up in three braids that braid each other. They put her in chains, or they do not put her in chains, but she feels them tight around her wrists still. They pull her arms away from her body, stretching her muscles to pastures. Her body an enemy. Her body a continent.

Viviane watched from the end of the aisle as the child hid inside the racks of clearance-priced clothing. She watched as the girl’s mother stretched a long spindly arm between the folds of tweed and cable-knit and pulled the kid through as if from the Narnia wardrobe.

A dish of strontium. A whiff of your brew. A drop of your semen. You’ll show the world sexuality doesn’t mean you’re barren. You will have your children. If even they’ll kill you.

“Let me see your face,” I drawled. A hologram projected outward from the glass screen on my desk’s surface. The floating face without its body was the same one my virtual lover displayed yesterday.

His mama’s red hair falls like a curtain around him, hiding him. His mama’s hair has always been long, but now? Now, it spills across the floor, a burning fire, a warning sign, a bloodbath. And he, fully grown, can hide himself within it. He dares not touch. Not with bloodied hands. He does not look down, but he can feel the slick drag of blood across knuckles, dripping from empty nail beds. His hands flex with aching listlessness.

A goat appears by the far corner of the pasture. Its fur is matted, its skin coarse, its eyes bleary and watchful - the light reflects against them, glowing eerie and as a flame to broken glass. You've found it lurking in the barren pockets of day, the empty valleys of night with your nose pressed to the fogged up window, cold and opaque as milk.

A calloused fingertip catches at my coiled skin. I shiver then hum, my voice a flat warble. A screw turns, stretching my sinews.

Crone cups her clit,

chamomile tea cooling next to the

cat, in the cottage. Her cottage.

Cinders fill the fireplace and outside

cool air, cool summer, cool vines

climbing the cottage walls she

cultivated in 1692 and

carried into now.

Never board a steam engine,

I was told by pious relatives.

It is the devil’s carriage headed

Straight for the mouth of Hell.

The first rains come to freeze my bones. I wrap my hands around the last soap ball I’ve made--the last one to tide me over for a while. When a bar of soap shrinks down to just a sliver, I crush it and hold it in my palm. If I find a new bar, I use it down to its last sliver as well and add it to the first until I’ve formed a larger ball, all pink and blue and white and green—my last bits since the stores closed down, and the windows blew out, and I cut my work clothes into makeshift curtains to hang.

It began with a drop of blood. She hadn’t been thinking. In fact, she hadn’t been sleeping or eating. It had been seven months since her last hair appointment, when she had gone, globe-stomached, and sat in a chair feeling the knead of the hairdresser’s fingers on her scalp as The Baby’s kicks thrummed against her, casting bumps on the smooth expanse of her flesh.

Cindy didn’t have much, but she had a book. Every night Cindy’s mother would read the book to her and show her the pictures, pictures of stars burning bright, meteors roaring through space, and far away planets where no human had ever been.

My ears fill with the flapping of a bird’s wings. The crow alights on its special perch outside my cell. I open my eyes to a world bathed in darkness, but not for much longer.