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We have a different relationship to pain, their mother used to say. It's our friend, our lover.

When you wake up and the pain is gone, do you know what that means?

What, they'd ask every time.

You're no longer a dancer.

Long summer nights, the click of the beetles, the soft grind of the cicadas, all those crickets rubbing their legs together, the low moan of the mosquitoes at the screen.

The Fire Eater, the Sword Swallower. They were both women, dark and fair and fearless, their heads pitched back, their mouths wide open, everything laid bare.

They could take these things inside them and emerge unscathed. Dangerous things, deadly things. They could take these things inside and remain untouched, immaculate. The same forever. Forever the same.

Every evening when he wasn't traveling, he'd come home from work and navigate stacks of pointe shoes, towers of them in the corners, tights hanging on doorknobs. Music, forever, from the old stereo console, from the turntable upstairs. The sound, forever, of the barre squeaking, Dara's or Marie's eager hands on it, their mother's voice intoning, Lift through the leg! Turn that foot out! Their house was all ballet, all the time.

It was the three of them. Always the three of them. Until it wasn't. And that was when everything went wrong. Starting with the fire. Or before.

I know what I know
The mouth is an orifice that should not weep red.
Old men should not purr.

Feeling of being a bowl of broth someone wants to eat before licking clean the spoon they ate you with. Thinking If I'm to be eaten best make sure I'm scalding hot, best make sure their tongues are blistering.

Slow sun today, taking its time in rising and setting and so my knees feel torn with the drawn-out devotion. Down to where the grass turns crisp with the sea and then further to where the wolves sometimes do their savaging, the soil there reddy with little cubs' bleeding. The wolves will die out if they're not careful, killing off their young. But then all they're doing is all any of us can do, which is the thing that makes sense at the time.

This is how we grew up: living inside a mistake until someone told you otherwise, and then living inside the shadow the mistake had made.

People overcomplicate Nature because they think her driven by something crude and fallible, something akin to human logic, and so they detect false errors and instances of cruelty.

The simplest answer, the route most direct: that's what we must look to.

What we know: when an interior, biological shift occurs within a species it is in response to an alteration in that species' environment.

What else we know: this new environment is proving more hostile to some of us than others.

Not an extinction, then, but a purge.

”God hates us.��

“The Carpenters?�� I asked.

“Women.�� She dabbed the lipstick against my lips, using her pinkie to smooth it into the corners. “He made us from the rib of man. That has been our curse ever since. Because of it, men have the shovel and we have the land. It’s right between our legs. There, they can bury all their sins. Bury ‘em so deep, no one knows about ‘em except for them and us.��

With a delicate step back she looked at me, her eyes cutting where they landed.

“My, my, Betty girl.�� she smiled. “Red is not your color, darlin��.��

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