face is hopeless: a ravine blanketed in kudzu with a vicious sneaky mud bottom that sucks you down with gristle sounds. I know this: I fell in once, my body nearly sucked in with the splat. The sucking gristle sounds of the depraved lonely mud my father had warned me about.

"Tabo them vines ain't good for swinging. They'll snap in a minute's time."

"Naw," I tell him, "They'll hold me fine," as I grasp the sinewy slickness of growth. I push off the muddy kudzu-blanketed bank vine in hand, then snap! splat! — the sucking greedy gristling consumes me. I land head deep, eye to eye with a dead salamander, the first I ever saw (in real life — not in books), his eyes empty ochre, staring outward into peace.

Later, when momma would holler for me and get no response, she blamed my trick ear: the cochlea-flooded-with-blackwater incident was the cause of my deafness. Then tubes fixed that.



Sophie

Nights crept by slowly as a young child lying in wait of sleep. Foreign voices traveled with the light from beneath the door that led to the hallway. I hear their increasing distance, the whispers and the baritone syllables becoming almost inaudible feathers of sound as they follow heavier footsteps into nothing. The slamming of doors echoes from remote regions, filtering through the cracks.

The voices have ceased from beyond my bedroom door, and the lights fade into dark ochre silhouetting the light about my door. I hear the claws of impatient creatures scratching the parlor wood at the base. This uncanny version of my surroundings combined with those strange voices keeps my senses sharp with apprehension. Sometimes I lie here for hours, staring at the quilt covering my dresser mirror as though to soften the blows of knives that would surely fly out the moment my eyelashes lowered, waiting for my muscles to mercifully slacken—for my body to melt into exhaustion.

Some nights in winter when frozen rain randomly cut into my sleeping mind, I would be submerged in a forest plagued by tornadoes. Twisting sinuous curves would tear out mammoth oak and pine trunks one by one, surrendered to the lullaby of tidal

<
>
1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14