“So I went on. I made a child come, a girl child but an idiot. An imbecile. Soft-brained. Her name was Nell. Now that was pure genius. Just like that, rolling off my tongue. Her own mother’s name turned around. I described how Helen tried to keep her hid, hid away from everybody as much she could but that little girl could not be stopped. And I suggested to Leah that her mother was not without complicity, to go from the father to the son like that, the blood all mixed around. As if it was the one thing she knew. As if she could not stop herself from being what she was. And watched your grandmother’s face then, knowing that what she’d just done with me was no different, that it fell the same way.

“But I did not stop there. It had to come all the way from the night she brained me and run off in the rain to that afternoon twenty-five years later when she hunched naked sweating in my bed. So what I told her I had done with her mother, and what her mother had done with me, was someway a version of what she and me had just done. Some better version. One in which both parties knew exactly what they were doing and why. Where there was no hazard like there had just been that one time I’d waited twenty-five years for but something else altogether. Where it was not love pictured but need. Dreadful terrible need that would not go away. Could not be slaked. For either one. Because it was what I wanted, you see. It was what I wanted it to have been with Leah.

“So the story goes on. There was that Nell. She made it come all the way around. An inspiration, she was. I made her an idiot but that could not stop her body. All she was was body. I drew her tangled whole out of the air. What a daughter! Sister to your grandmother and cousin all at once. Who was fourteen years old when her throat was cut open in the middle of the night by someone unknown over in Niggertown where she’d been sneaking off for two-three years. Some jealous wife I suggested. Maybe even just some man sick of her. A simple creature-child who just wanted to lay back and splay her legs. The way any of us do. Leah fallen silent then, the sheet dropped off her shoulders. Flies landing on her and her not even aware. The smell of her still strong in the room. Her face like something broken by stone.