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259 pages, Hardcover
First published September 29, 2020
My mother always says that the story you believe depends on the body you’re in.
My mother said it was the only story she wanted me to own. My inheritance was hurt.
When I shoved the scab aside with my fingernails, there was a hole beneath, deep as my finger and bloodless as a glove socket. I slid my forefinger in, trying to diagnose what kind of hole it was. I named every hole-species I knew: wells; wombs; wounds; spots in the wall where my brother stuck his pencil through, thinking the walls would scab on their own, and when they didn’t, he sealed them with his boogers and let them petrify into stone; lakes; seas, which meant most of the world was a hole, which meant I was native to holes, animal burrows, anuses, atlases. Twirling my finger inside the hole above my ass, I decided that it must be the beginning of a fault-line, a seismic shift of my spine.
In the animal encyclopedia Ben and I memorized, every hierarchy had a name. Every violence a vocabulary. Somewhere, there was a name for our exchange, in a language that was kept from us.
In wartime, land is measured by the bones it can bury. A house is worth only the bomb that banishes it. Gold can be spent in any country, any year, any afterlife. The sun shits it out every morning. Even Ma misreads the slogans on the back of American coins: IN GOLD WE TRUST. That's why she thinks we're compatible with this country. She still believes we can buy its trust.
I'm not going to change the sheets for you, not even if you wet yourself. Why do you think you're sweating so much? Because you're sick? It's the sea in you. That stretch of sheet where you've pissed the mattress: a shoreline. The heart's a fish. If you open your mouth, it'll swim out of you, touch air, die. When I say shut your mouth, I mean survive.
• Only my mother could call to me like that, a sound worn fist-smooth, a sound I could saddle and ride, relieved for a second of my own weight while she carried me in her mouth.
• She rinsed the dishes so bright we had to squint while eating; she sang to a knife as if auditioning to be its blade.
• She told me she was blowing boys in the woods. And for years I imagined she was blowing them up, shearing open their bellies and burying dynamite inside, necklaces of boymeat dangling from the trees.
• The night bruised its kneecap moon.
• Ma leaves the house early. Sunup: the sky bleeding where it's given birth.
• It was early in the night and the sky was bad-breathed, freckled with stars like white bacteria on a tongue.
• Above us, the moon was marinating in its own silver sweat.
• The morning we leave, the sun sags in the sky like a scrotum.
• It's summer and the sky is vomiting. It rains in chunks.
The only time the holes were coherent was when Ben and I touched. When we kissed in front of them, they cinched their lips and listened, opening only to say yes, yes. While night erected itself around us like a tent, we sat cross-legged on the soil and its tapestry of worms. Ben laced her legs around my waist. Her mouth so close I could see the serrations of her teeth, sawing every sound in half so that I heard it twice: my name, my name. I leaned forward, flicked her upper lip with my bottom one. We met inside our mouths. I found the seam under her tongue and undid it. With my hands around her, I felt her spine through her shirt, a ladder to thirst. All around us, the holes were full of bright sound, jingling like a handful of nickels.
Your hands will plot their own holes, and when they do, I won’t come and rescue you.