A crazy stillness settled in her thinking. She remembered a barn boxing match she had once witnessed in Dixon. It was so dark in the barn they had surrounded the boxers with their trucks to light the event. The stark headlamps had made the boxers seem like movie stars to her, the skin of the men so white in the white lights their whole bodies haloed a soft glow. The boxers had held each other’s keen stares with a tenderness like love. Even when they were pulled apart they did not break their gaze. There was a silence she had not known before, a humid silence so heavy the only sound she heard was the sound of the boxers’ heavy fists hissing at all of them. And when one boxer fell to the floor she witnessed the brutal ache of his sweat shimmering above his head.

She reached up to the sink. She pulled herself up and had turned toward Baptiste to back out of the room when he lunged at her. She felt a dull ache in her chest. The beer-splattered floor shined like the eyes of ten thousand snakes. A red sleep whispered to Louise, soles of hard shoes on slick floors, her dead mother’s hair in the jar by the juniper, Arliss’s white socks on wire in the wind.

She wasn’t sure how long she lay on the floor listening to Baptiste’s lung-hissing sobs. She told her grandmother to shut Baptiste up. “Stop, Baptiste,” she said. And her sister, Florence, grabbed her hand, told her Baptiste was gone, had been gone for hours. Baptiste had run away like a coward.

“You can stop crying now,” her sister said. “Baptiste won’t hurt you.”

Louise remembered the floor grit on her cheek, the new crack in her head where the wind howled now. She began to feel the weak flesh of her tender head. It was sore and wet. She could feel the slit. She tried to get up but her left leg was asleep. She could see the boot mark, the swollen blood-blue egg on her shin. Her left side felt heavy and oddly weak. She had the sensation that her breast was being pinched hard.

She looked down to see the scowl of wet blood tightening to her chest. She tugged at her sticky blouse to keep the blood from drying to her skin. She could see the open moon, curved up around one side of her nipple, banking off the side of her head, and Baptiste’s hands again, Baptiste’s hands hitting, Baptiste’s hands shining with snatches of her hair, Baptiste’s hands slapping her face. He had hit her hard, hard enough to wake her up and set her to sleep again. Her teeth rattled and Louise thought Baptiste was at the window.