ARRvol34 master reduced - Flipbook - Page 111
sometimes called Annie. Her skin is a very dark brown and her eyes
do not seem to reflect light as well as Jude’s. They are dull, if you
like the idiom. In any case, when the very dark man was putting his
cells into the mother, whose name is also Annabelle, she opened
her eyes very wide, much more than she would ever do again, and
breathed out with such force that she almost choked, and her pupils
dilated. This was, she would later state, while tears competed with
rage and fear for control of her face, a “beautiful thing.”
In fact, she said, “I knew it was right, it felt right goddammit and
I’ll leave with him if I have to and don’t tell me a beautiful thing like
that was wrong; I’m grown now.” The man to whom Annabelle the
Elder spoke, her father, performed a function of his machinery such
that he became all of one purpose all at once.
He said, “You bitch, I will goddamn kill you, kill you and your
goddamn whore self, and your whore self’s damned offal,” and she
screamed as he began the functions of that task. He acted in the
mistaken belief that she was his property. Strictly speaking, being
sixteen revolutions around the sun in age, she functionally was
what he would have called his property, despite the merely conventional status of functionality. He did not fulfill his intent, though he
did produce her nearly sneering narrowed eye’s permanence. Her
offal, which is Annabelle the Younger, is the first of her children.
And so we see that the man to whom the Elder spoke was mistaken.
Such is often said between the Elder and Younger.
Right now the Younger, who provided little Jude in the sunlight
in the kitchen with his little head of broccoli, is crouched in the
house’s bathroom. She is crying and trying not to, her face knotting,
hiding that it is beautiful. She is doing this because something in
her head does not work properly, or rather, they work in a manner
contrary to what her mother calls “right thinking,” an absurdity. The
young Annabelle is twisting the white cloth she is wrapped in, a
towel, between her fingers. She will, in a moment, go out to where
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