Then she was pink and shiny and alarmed looking without the wool around her eyes. He slit her front, throwing her heavy stomachs and intestines to the dogs too, picking out the transparent emerald-green sac of bile and tossing it away, saving the heart and liver.

CHAPTER 8

After lunch on the day I failed Dice, Bay found me washing out manure in the cow stalls.

All winter, Bay and I had been at two ends of a propeller, spinning around the same center. He often left rooms just as I entered, and I returned the favor by sitting at the far side of the table. When I avoided him for days, he’d reward me—as I did dishes, he brushed his hand along my neck and I felt my hackles rise. My game was seeing how long I could hang on to the shivers from three seconds of contact. It was like holding a candy in my mouth and trying not to suck.

“I’m going to go Dumpster in Mars Hill,” he said. “Dice wants you to come.” He brushed his thumb over my hand and I burned for him.

This would be my first trip off the farm since I’d arrived. Bay opened the car for me and I sat on the seat, soft compared to everything at the farm. If this was a punishment for my inability to kill the lamb, it did not feel like one. He strode off for a minute, returned, and handed me an icicle rolled in sorghum molasses. I licked the rich brown syrup off and held the icicle, which diminished to nothing and trickled out of my fist. As we drove, I had the sense that life was moving too quickly for me. Bay told me that last year a giant icicle had fallen from the barn and skewered a lamb straight through the throat.

“Dice wanted me to kill a lamb today,” I said.

Bay said nothing.

As a result of the lamb or the icicle or Bay, I shuddered. Deep down, I liked to shudder. There was some circuit in my body and the wires were touching. I didn’t want to be like my mother and end up in a world where I was always cautious.

The back lot of the Ingles Market shone like a mirage. I hadn’t seen pavement since September—five months before—and it was so smooth it resembled a carpet. My feet hit the asphalt too hard. The air smelled chemical. I didn’t recognize this as the world I’d left behind.

We filled four trash barrels with bruised produce, mushrooms in little wooden baskets, perfectly soft mangoes, plastic cartons of cherry tomatoes, zucchinis wrapped in plastic, bell peppers, hands of spotty bananas. I tried to ask about whether I needed to make amends with Dice, but Bay ignored me.