“Ruth!” my father shouted. “Judith!”

Ruth was still looking down at the baby. Its head thrown all the way back, its mouth peeled open like a rotted fruit. She took a long, raspy breath in through her mouth, and started to sob. “I wish I’d never come here.” She covered her face with both hands. She did not even look at me. “I wish I’d never come here. I don’t want to be here. I wish I’d never come here.”

I looked at Ruth, with her cut and bleeding hands, her tears peeling the dust away from her fingertips, dirty and with leaves in her hair. She did not look like me and never had, and she was ugly when she cried, a wrinkled, hurtful ugliness. And though I pitied her later, I hated her then, seeing for the first time in her something that had always been there and that I would know about, now, forever. Watching her stand, a few minutes later, in front of Aunt Vera, numb and unresisting when Aunt Vera pulled her scrabbling down the slope by her hair and slapped her, and they both stood in the aftermath, considering each other. Watching her at the onset of middle school, hunching her covered body in front of her locker like a mushroom sprung up in a yard, overnight and unwelcome. And watching her walk herself home after school, when Aunt Vera drove past her with Nicky in the car, and Ruth turned her head to catch her own face in the passing mirror of the window, and then spat on the ground only once the car was well past. Watching her, after, from a remove, like a wasp trapped, spindled and buzzing, under a jar.

I saw her now unbelonging, her rejection of us, of me, even as hard as I had tried to make her mine. How she was lost to me beyond hope of regaining and I was not sure, anymore, why I had even wanted her.

“Dad!” I shouted, calling down the hillside, calling away from Ruth’s wet face that would not even look at me. “Nicky’s here! Ruth brought him up here!”

Take Only What Belongs to You

To the Library of Congress, Esther carries a slim blue book, clutching it beneath her coat. Her free hand is jammed into her fleece-lined pocket, her fingers tapping against the fabric like the skin of a drum. With every breath, she feels as if she is trying to inhale under a great weight.

Beside her, Cora hums something unrecognizable, breathing white music into the winter air. She isn’t even wearing her hood, and she looks like a character in a Christmas movie, flecks of snow caught up in her dark hair.

A corner of the book’s cover presses into the meat of Esther’s left breast. It’s a volume of short stories, bound in old cloth, with a silver tree embossed on the front. The title page reads Housecat, Wildcat: A Collection by Anais Casey.