When the woman’s ancient family died, she was left with their farm and farm house. She’d grown up there but left for college. In the city, she studied history, specifically Elizabethan, but more specifically, she went to parties and danced and twirled in the arms of anyone who would listen to her tell about where she was from. How she grew up without ever knowing a stranger. How she was related to everyone. How she dreamed of reading books about people she saw on PBS documentaries—she’d wake up in the middle of the night and come downstairs and sit in front of the TV, learning about worlds far from the cotton fields outside her window.
“Don’t your parents read,” everyone would ask her.
And she’d laugh.
No one could believe it.
Of course she couldn’t find a job in the city after graduating and there was only so much galavanting to museums and symphonies left to do before, as mentioned earlier, all her family died and she had to come back home to her inherited destiny: the land.
The woman said goodbye to all her like-minded friends and cultural indulgences—goodbye banh mi, falafel, injera—goodbye hot yoga, femme book clubs, “safe spaces.” And she settled into her farmhouse a mile off the road from the nearest dying town. But she didn’t want to live alone so she bought a special little circus breed dog and a couple of pigs. And she busied herself renovating the old barn into an apartment and scouted potential renters when she went into town.
She frequented J.J.’s, the local grocery store, because she often craved the tastes of her childhood like Cheez-Its and Mounds. And it was there that she met and fell in love with the checkout girl, Shania. And she quickly offered the young mother her barn apartment.
Shania moved in with her son and boyfriend. The boyfriend worked at the chicken factory. It was his job to hang up the birds by their feet and press the button for the machine to cut their heads off. The boy was three and he liked to play in the yard early in the mornings with the woman’s little circus dog. The dog would jump and turn in the air for him and the boy would giggle.
Then the woman would wave goodbye to all of them when they left for town and wait for them at the window in the evenings until they got home.
But then one day a man came to install wifi at the woman’s farm and she seduced him. She bathed him and braided his hair and traced his dragon tattoos with her tongue. And then he started sleeping there every night.
And sometimes they’d all get together in the woman’s yard for shared cookouts. Shania would bring hamburger from work and her boyfriend would bring chickens and the wifi lover would cook them up on the grill. Shania and the woman would share a bottle of Barefoot pinot gris and the boy would chase lighting bugs with the little circus dog. Then the woman would always look up at the stars and say to the little boy, “You can see so many out here can’t you?” “Yes,” he would always squeal.
Spring turned to summer and summer turned to fall and, to keep herself from getting bored back in the country, the woman started chaining her lover up under the kitchen table for fun. It’s one of those nights when she has the man chained down there naked, whipping his ass with a belt and making him bark, when they hear sirens coming from a long ways off, getting closer and closer.
The woman jumps to the window and watches a police car and then an ambulance fly up the path to her barn. The lights flash into the kitchen window, turning everything blue.
The woman unchains the man. And they throw on their heavy jackets, walk into their boots, and head out to see what’s the matter. They are greeted by a policeman, one of her distant cousins, one she’d grown up with in school.
You can see his breath as he talks and this is what he tells them:
Shania called 911 about her son, she said he was choking on Kool-Aid. When the EMTs got there, the boy was in the middle of the living room floor, already purple. They went to perform mouth to mouth and when they cut open his little shirt to get to him better, they saw wounds all over his little body. It looked like the boy’d been choked with extension cords, whipped with a belt. Burns, deep, deep burns with pus all infected. And won’t no bandages, look like they ain’t never been cleaned. That little boy was neglected. Them wounds was trying to heal themselves. Ain’t no telling what all he went through.
The policeman cousin clears his throat:
Shania done it, her boyfriend told us standing right there. And I ain’t ever gonna forget how she looked at him while he was telling it. Just sick. Just pure evil…her own child.
The woman feels herself falling. She clings to the man’s hip bone in the brown dry grass.
But the policeman cousin keeps going:
And then another little boy ran out from the back bedroom. Did y’all know she had twins?
The woman coughs, she chokes.
Yeah, she’s got twins and was keeping one inside the house to beat on and taking the other one out into the world like there won’t nothing wrong with it. Ain’t no telling what that boy went through. He may not have even learned how to walk or talk or nothing. And none of her folks say they knew a thing about him.
The woman looks back towards the cop car and watches Shania bang her head against the window. Shania’s son is squirming in the arms of another policeman, trying to get loose. He’s watching his mama and crying. And the little circus dog is right there underneath him too, barking at the sound.
In the morning, the man leaves to install wifi. The woman feeds her pigs. And she walks through the tall grass to Shania’s. She goes inside and lays down in the middle of the living room floor. She wants to know why the hell she never heard the boy crying when he was getting beaten and strangled, burned and bruised. Was he able to transcend? Turn into a spirit and leave his little body like an angel? Did he hover above himself, never looking down to see what was happening? Only up and smiling.
And Shania. Where is she now? In the county holding cell combing her fingers through her hair. And how does she feel knowing the little thing she could always beat on is gone?
A few days pass and the lover leaves and Shania’s boyfriend goes to live with his family. The circus dog waits in the path to do tricks for the little boy, but the boy’s riding a bus, being sent to a children’s home in Raleigh.
The woman is alone again. She sits down and writes letters to all the unborn children her friends from college are carrying. In Kentucky, Minnesota, Ohio, Illinois. She stops to go outside and pick cotton fluff, something from home to send them. “Let them rub it under their noses,” she writes. “That’s what I did as a baby.” The evening light falls in on her.
She walks all the way to the end of her path, puts the letters in the mailbox. She runs back to the house and climbs the magnolia tree as high as it’ll take her. She screams out to her land. And if you keep pulling up, you’ll lose her in the tree, but you’ll see the moon shining on the tin roof of the farmhouse. The farm all alone, way outside town. The wilderness that surrounds them. The slick of the pigs’ backs, moving in the dark. And even this far away, you can still hear her. And you can feel the boy near you, floating in stars.