I walk through the wintered tunnels, the meat less red now, brown instead now, glisten gone. I take the left, though the walls no longer reach out to touch me.

I dig into the ground where they don’t harvest, I dig down into the dirt where they’ll never go. I dig until I sweat, until I am covered in the red dust, until I am in a small hole deep as I am tall.

I climb out, chest heaving. I pick up the small box of my child. I press my lips against the top. I try to remember a prayer and no prayer comes.

The box looks even smaller at the bottom of the hole. I move the red soil like a machine: bury, bury, bury.

I walk home slowly, covered in the red.

EACH DAY DEATH WAITS FOR ME. SOME days are clear as a river, others, a black serpent waits in the bush, watches me, ready to curl around my body, clench down, take pink air from lungs. I return again and again to the memories, to the barn, the white house, to the Meat Quarry long since closed, gated up.

VISION

My daughter latches to my breast, pink lips, pink nipple, the flow of milk. It is the morning, golden light through the window, a room of white. Her small hand curls around mine, fingers clenching, the crown of her soft head translucent, downed.

Outside, the world goes by, first a car, then a truck, then a train. A small hum begins in my gut and works its way up to my chest, through my throat, past my lips, the light vibration rocking her as she sucks, nourishing until a thin line of blood works its way into the milk, pinking it, until she pushes my breast away, her mouth opening into a dark red void.

Part III

PART III

I RETURN TO THE ADS AGAIN. THIS TIME, I look away from the city, away from the sharpness of the skyscrapers, the elbows, the hard corners of the metal dumpsters rotting in the street.

The ads read:

SHACK AVAILABLE

LAND PARCEL EXPIRING, CHEAP

75 ACRE VACANCY WITH ELECTRIC NEAR ROAD LAKE ACCESS ACRE MUST GO

SMALL CABIN FOR RENT

I circle the fourth listing, then go into the country. The train hauls its body over the tracks. The sun glints through the window and my hollow womb echoes back.

Flashes as we cross the landscape: My mother’s hands and their specific sunspots, my father’s stale scent in the morning, the pattern of my brother’s beard patching across his cheeks.

The small town is in the country, but far from The Acres and my parents. I step out of the tiny train station and into the town proper, four blocks of shops: a bar, a grocery store, a post office. Blue-black mountains rise up beyond all of that.