![]() My aunt Raylene came out on the porch and almost fell on me, not seeing me, not seeing anything at all. I watched to see and there wasn’t nothing but the blood, thinning out desperately while the house slowed down and grew quite, hours of cries growing soft and low, moaning under the smoke. Randall went by and said there’d be a baby, a hatched egg to throw out with the rags, but there wasn’t. Cora threw them on the fire and stood motionless in the stinking smoke. After a while the blood on the rags was thin, watery, almost pink. I had seen them helping her up the stairs while the thick blood ran down her legs. Some of the older cousins obviously did, their strange expressions broken by stranger laughs. I waited on the porch making up words to the shouts around me. The other cousins all ran off to catch the sparks or poke the fire with dogwood sticks. Cousin Cora brought buckets of bloody rags out to be burned. Her screams went up and down in the back of the house. Once, way before Tommy died, I was pushed out on the steps while everyone stood listening to my Cousin Barbara. I was born between the older cousins and the younger, born in a pause of babies and therefore outside, always watching. But Jesse slides over to hug me, to press her face against my ear, to whisper, “How wonderful to be part of such a large family.” I realize I do not really know what lavender smells like, and I am for a moment afraid she will ask something else, some question that will betray me. “Like lavender,” stomach churning over the memory of sour sweet and snuff. “What did your grandmother smell like?” I lie to her the way I always do, a lie stolen from a book. ![]() I listen with my mouth open, not believing but wanting, aching for the fairy tale she thinks is everyone’s life. ![]() She tells stories about her childhood, about her father going off each day to the university, her mother who made all her dresses, her grandmother who always smelled of dill bread and vanilla. Jesse and I have been lovers for a year now. My mama took my head in her hands and turned my eyes away. Wasn’t he running ahead of us? Someone came up behind me. My cousin, Tommy, eight years old as I was, swung in the sunlight with his face as black as his shoes-the rope around his neck pulled up into the sunlit heights of the barn, fascinating, horrible. Bille ran right through the open doors and out again, but I stopped, caught by a shadow moving over me. River of Names by Dorothy Allison At a picnic at my aunt’s farm, the only time the whole family ever gathered, my sister Billie and I chased chickens into the barn. ![]()
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