Epigraphs
"So now that I, even I am he, and there is no god with me; I kill and I make alive, I wound and I heal, neither is there any can deliver out of my hand."
-- Deuteronomy 32:39
"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"
"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 1)", Aquemini
Text
I glanced at his face, the sweat like a glaze. My lips were open. Another me would've licked it off, and it would've tasted like salt. But this girl wouldn't lean forward, wouldn't smile as she mouthed his neck. This girl waited because she wasn't like the women in the mythology book, the women who kept me turning the pages: the trickster nymphs, the ruthless goddesses, the world-uprooting mothers. Io, who made a god's heart hot with love; Artemis, who turned a man into a deer and had her dogs tear him cartilage from bone; Demeter, who made time stop when her daughter was stolen. [15-16]
He had never kissed me except like this, with his body, never his mouth. My underwear slid down my legs. He was peeling away my clothes like orange rind; he wanted the other me. The pulpy ripe heart. The sticky heart the boys saw through my boyish frame, my dark skin, my plain face. The girly heart that, before Manny, I'd let boys have because they wanted it, and not because I wanted to give it. I'd let boys have it because for a moment, I was Psyche or Eurydice or Daphne. I was beloved. But with Manny, it was different; he was so beautiful, and still he chose me, again and again. He wanted my girl heart; I gave him both of them. The pines seemed to circle like a ring-a-rosy, and I fell. It will be quick, I thought. He will bury his face in my hair. He will growl when he comes. I dug my heels into the backs of his thighs. Even though I knew all the other boys, I knew him and his body best: I loved him best. I showed him with my hips. My hair a pillow in the red dirt. My breasts hurt. I wanted him to lean down, to touch me everywhere. He wouldn't, but his hips would. China barked, knife sharp. I was bold as a Greek; I was making him hot with love, and Manny was loving me. [16-17]
Under the oak, Shaliyah waves at her face with a candy box, fanning. She rubs one arm and then the other, and flips her hand as if she is flinging off the sweat she finds there. 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. [118-119]
When Mama was birthing Junior, she put her chin down into her chest. She panted and moaned. The ends of her moans squeaked, sounded like bad brakes grinding when a car stops. She never screamed, though. Skeetah and Randall and I were sneaking, standing on an old air-conditioning unit outside her and Daddy's window, and after she pushed Junior out, once he started crying, she let her head fall to the side, her eyes like mirrors, and she was looking at us, and I thought she would yell at us to get down out of the window, to stop being nosy. But she didn't. She saw us. She blinked slow. The skin above her nose cracked and she bit her lip. She shook her head then, raised her chin to the ceiling like an animal on the slaughter stump, like I've seen Daddy and Papa Joseph hold pigs before the knife, and closed her eyes. She started crying then, her hands holding her belly below her deflated stomach, soft as a punctured kickball. I had never seen her cry. But she hadn't said anything, even after Daddy called some of their friends, Tilda and Mr. Joe, to the house to watch us, even after he carried her and Junior out to the truck and she slumped against the window, watching us as Daddy drove away. Shaking her head. Maybe that meant no. Or Don't worry--I'm coming back. Or I'm sorry. Or Don't do it. Don't become the woman in this bed. Esch, she could have been saying. But I have. [221-222]
