9781250816214

her stomach floods itself with acid and she knows, she knows she had
nothing to do with this. He carves the roast, not her. It’s too big for her little
hands, he always laughs, babying the blade with an oilcloth before putting it
away himself.
There are marks on the bone, the same marks that slashed up the back of
the hairbrush, black scaldings, black letters in a language set in direct
opposition to the friendly kinds of letters that spell out Orpington’s Organic
Co-Op over the place where the evening roast flies joyfully to your arms.
And it is not a chicken bone. Sophia wants it to be. More than anything,
in this blue-washed moment with the stars craning their necks toward her in
particular, more than anything she wants it to be a chicken bone. To smell
of sage and rosemary and butter. But it doesn’t, because it can’t. It smells
only of time and loneliness and wild, hot, endless sands.
Sophia cannot help knowing what she knows. She is standing in her
beautiful open floor-plan kitchen in her perfect sprawling house holding the
tip of a human finger.