ARRvol34 master reduced - Flipbook - Page 114
“I came to High Lemon for work, Annie, not your bullshit.” She
tends to say High Lemon as if it is a single word, and an aspiration
on the first consonant, a peculiarity of her accent, one supposes.
When she gathered the cells to make Jude, she screamed and fought
the man with very light skin. The darkest skin on her body is a place
on her cheek where her teeth were pushed into the flesh thereof, by
the application of that man’s hand, curled into a ball and accelerated into her face. That man will die of old age, with a great quantity
of money. Many people on many occasions will, and have called him
kind. He has given many people money. That is one of the reasons
humans call other humans kind.
The reason Annabelle and her sister, Ruth, will have the above
conversation, is as follows. Annabelle has left the bedroom and is
washing the dishes that are in the sink in the kitchen. She is now in
sunlight, squinting and humming. Jude is on his feet. The broccoli in
his stomach has been transformed into a paste in his pants, and he
is smiling at nothing or at the chair he is still playing with. A bit of
egg and bacon brewing in Annabelle’s stomach is having difficulty
coming apart properly inside of her. She stops humming and places
a hand on her belly. She looks at Jude. She has never and will never
in her life produce from pain that sort of thing.
The Elder on her chair on her porch in front of her house blinks.
The desiccated grass beneath the brutalized trees shivers under a
wind charred and sucked of moisture. Some prolific calamity in the
breeze offends her, perhaps, and she calls, and is heard through the
open window by the front door, “Annie, Annabelle come.” She shifts
her gaze to the opposing, nigh identical, houses, amid shadows in
the yellow calcification of her sight, and the paving, written between, and back to her trees.
106
As the Younger passes through the dining room and toward the
hallway leading to the front door, she inhales sharply through her
nose in pain, and again touches her belly. An exchange of elec-
