So when he pulled me down into the cane fields, I sunk my teeth into his neck and tasted the salt of his sweat under the high noon, in the dirt, among the wiregrass that scratched at my bare skin, and I thought, Okay, here I am. Okay, here we are. Okay, here comes the thing my mother said I must be watchful for. Here was the dark creature, coming out, breath by long breath, pushing itself out through our wet mouths and my hands that grabbed at his hair and we rolled between the rows of sugarcane that stretched high above our heads. I was sure. I was determined. I was the girl who felt the water drip down from my chin to my neck and pool in the bowls of my collarbone, the wells of lust, the thirst of fifteen and fucking, for the first time, outside in the windless heat. He moaned and whimpered like a puppy, just a kid, trying to contain the thing but not able to keep it still. I touched his earlobe, soft and still covered in fuzz, as a trio of vultures circled over the field, marking the stink of a rotten body, a cage of ribs, a feast for the taking. He came and fell on me, in a heavy fall, until my whole self was covered with the weight of his self, and the only thing uncovered was my face still staring up above me towards the spot where the cane parted and the sky loomed in a white hot burn. He sighed, because it was over, and so it was over, and it didn’t seem so hurtful or so wrong, and as I lay there thinking of the way my mother might be wrong, to listen was good, to follow the pull of the heat could be saving, a pair of faces came and crowded my view. Two men looked over us then, spit tobacco juice from the corners of their mouths. They winked and smiled their smiles of crooked teeth and long pink gums. They loosened their belts. They said, Well, well, well.

In the afternoon when Anse was asleep and with the last one still walking home from school, instead of going to gut and clean the fish I would walk down the road to the arboretum where I could sit quiet and hate them. It would be still at the pond, with the glass water and rabbit bones and everything slow and dead, smelling of mud and sap and the the black wet earth.

And so I took Whitfield. I was unvirgin before and unvirgin after he came down through the high brush and the cattails and said words that were nothing, empty air, loose as the water that has no shape, but he was not-Anse and so I took him. He said Love at the start and Adultery at the end, but they both meant the same thing or nothing, I did not know. It doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter what they call it.

I would take him in the mud next to the water that lapped at our toes and find that I had forgotten my own name. And so the blood curdled and clotted, contained itself within myself and refused to flood again. I would think: I am full and empty, motionless, still as the rabbit lying there soft and quiet and beginning to liquefy underneath its fur. I was a cold jar, a hallowed tree, a body up-and-down and then flying flat sideways. I would think: I am already dead.

Then it was over. I said I won’t ever tell it. And he said I had every right to tell it, but I knew to him they were just words in the air that turned to nothing. They were wooden sounds. They were pale wisps of a thing already gone.

December ??, 1937
Oaxaca

———Day: and once again, the cruel splendor of a glowering star: hot and molten, blazing across the road and through the dusty curtain into the cloistered shadows of a room where, commingled with its plangent rays, sound all of the voices of the world: boys eating chocolate skulls, the horses in the road, the carts and marketplace and, maybe, possibly, somewhere across the stony paths, the sound of ¡Feliz Navidad! and your voice, if it’s your voice, carried on the back of a mother who walks with her wares, a glass bottle, a hollow chorus. And as if this were not enough, in the afternoon, in the bleeding golden light, the sounds of slaughtering in the kitchen reverberate like so many sharpened knives through the floorboards of my room. I should wait and let them splinter the wood, drive their serrated tips, like the silver narrowed teeth of feeding sharks, through my feet and fingers and throat. I should let them sever the nerves or cut out my liver; I am already a dead Prometheus, flayed and withered on the rocks. …The gods roar in the running water of the faucets, in the liquid that drowns my fever, all sounding like thunder when I submerge my head in the porcelain bath, wrathful, grieving and echoing: you stole the fire; we want it back. The green vulture comes daily through the open window to feast on my organs. He sits perched on the washbasin. He flies at me with his claws poised to tear open my flesh and then, quietly, terribly, his cold beak buries itself inside the putrid cavity of my soul.

Do you wonder how I am? This was our room, once, if you remember, in Oaxaca, with the slaughtering sounds then muted by the grace of your body and your eyes and Oh, Yvonne. I am utterly alone. I try to write, telegrams and letters, on sheets of paper that lay like crumpled ghosts in the wastebasket, under the bedsheets, on the stained floors of the cantinas that creak and rattle under the weight of the patrons who stumble across its length. I know this is hell. I know this is hell to see your figure in the glass and to realize it is only an illusion: my hand touches nothing but the cool air and the lacquer of this bar that stretches like a thirsty unspooled tongue from one end of the room to the other. In the shadows and noise, there is a woman that weeps. Have you wept for us? Have you wept for your fool of a husband who cannot find his way without you? Come back to me, Yvonne. Y. The first letter of your name and and and, repeating in my skull, the necessary fulcrum, the only conjunction: how can we live apart?

—The woman beside me weeps for her lost son, Cristobal, shot, one year ago, in this same cantina. Is Mexico dead? Is the world asleep? I stumble out into the darkness, the somber night, a somnambulator lost in a field of shuttered stars. How much time has passed? Has it been days or weeks? Not months, I know, it is still December. The roads here are steep and crowded with houses, perpetually leaning towards each other, dreaming of touching their leaky roofs and swollen gutters, if only for a moment…

And then today the beggars touched my coatsleeve on the road. I brushed them away and wandered into a garden that wasn’t mine and fell asleep among the weeds. Something had eaten the flower-heads. I dreamed that I was already dead: my face pressed against the soil: a swarm of insects suddenly teeming over my body and feasting upon my face. The locusts took my eyes—the fine pupil and crescent of lid and quivering optic nerve. And this is how I sometimes think of myself: a corpse in a stranger’s garden, faceless, a brood of insects fastidiously consuming the carcass, piece by piece, hair by hair, while scorpions dance in a venomous parade along my torso and a river of cockroaches descend, one by one, their antennae waving, into the spirals of my ear: a stranger, an exiled corpse, dissolving into the dirt. ——I cannot sleep without seeing the volcanoes. They are opened veins spewing forth the lava of their blown cores: invisibly, furtively, for anyone who gazes at their flat black crowns imagines they are dormant. It is not so. I am aware of some imminent explosion. I am roiling glowing mass, set ablaze and burning, for you…your face. If you ever loved me, come back. I am lying in a valley, under the volcano, about to be buried and waiting to be found.

She was an aerial blazing comet—hurtling with a determined velocity through the vast coldness of space, around the astral bodies and spiraling diamond galaxies, their arms outstretched, reaching, curving toward her as if to grasp her body, as if to draw her towards their centrifugal suckling mouths: the stellar nursery, the infant nebulae, the birthplace of planets and moons and other earths, less beautiful, less lonely, blooming now with the verdurous ecstasy of a newly minted soul.

She flew past the clusters of constellations, the lines between their points suddenly drawn clear in the darkness, vivid and bright and knowing—each shape becoming clearer, their flat edges suddenly bearing dimension and weight, the volume of a being. She watched the bears and centaurs and southern cross come unhinged from their fixed points and she gathered her favorite stars and stuffed them in the pocket of her dress. …Her fingers were made of a million burning suns, effervescent, tingling and pulsating, and she reached out her hand to touch the cold mud of a gray planet. She felt a shiver in her gaseous spine, sparkling, glittering, and broke apart the terrestrial plates to form separate continents of her own. Pangaea dead, her first murder, and she scraped at the raw dirt until her nails bled and the edges were formed: new shores, new oceans. A continent has no countries, she thought, peripherally, before there are people’it is all a single rolling place.

She strode easily, gracefully, down the side of her creation, feeling her feet haphazardly creating the valleys and the mountains and the soft swamps of lower ground. She cleaved handfuls of rock with her teeth and touched her finger to the shavings, alighting them and making them spin in the air, metamorphic beads: turning bright: to wood, to grass, to blood and human bone. She felt herself grow smaller. She looked over her bare shoulder, across the valley, beyond the mountain, under the twisting breaking clouds, but she was alone. She felt the earth stretch higher and higher above her, wild and unkempt, and before she lost the beautiful blazing thrust of a comet’s arm, she flung the stars in her pocket back up into the theater of space.

She felt, then, the notches of her spine click into place: hardened and connected, no longer the buoyant tissue of an astral body: she was mortal; she was a woman in a nightgown, sweating and turning in her sleep, reaching her arms out in the darkness of an unknown room, clutching the air, touching without feeling the fine gradients of moonlight.