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.

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