ARRvol34 master reduced - Flipbook - Page 112
the old Annabelle is sitting, narrowing her eyes at her hideously
afflicted trees, suffering as much as prospering under the sun.
She twists the hem of the towel and sobs, and her breathing is
sharp and fast, and she swallows hard, preventing the noises her
exhalations would otherwise produce. When her eyes open, she
looks at the tops of her hands. Her hands are thin, and small, and
smooth. Her hands have been complimented. They are very dark.
They are significantly darker than the other woman that her mother
made inside of her belly, with another man’s cells, a man who was
very light indeed, the very lightest human males can be. In fact, he
looked rather a bit like Jude’s father. Both of those men who donated cells to Annabelle the Elder live in a place called Louisiana.
The Younger is breathing more slowly now, and she says, “I’m not a
damn servant. They always do me like this, they, those fuckers.” She
does not keep talking but stares at her hands. The walls of the bathroom are a color like her skin, and made from the corpses of trees
like those outside the ugly house, but more impressive.
Jude has forgotten the broccoli and is crawling from the kitchen
to the room called the dining room, to which the kitchen is attached. He is not bathed in sunlight now. He says to a chair next to
the round thing called a table, “No, you baba,” and he makes a sound
that is not a word. He laughs. It is probably at this moment that he
achieves his greatest feat of intelligence and perspicacity in the
clean joy of recognition without knowledge, and it is proper that
the ascending violence of his life, violence which will culminate in
the murder of his second wife, should begin in the moments which
immediately abut this instant. It is possible that the mechanism in
his stomach, which is turning a bit of the broccoli into future events,
and the mechanism in his brain, which is turning the screws of his
body to slap the chair as he will one day slap a friend on the shoulder, can be cause of all that follows. If you like the idiom.
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