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Everything you needed to get your keepsake and make use of the rest.
Nothing wasted. Nothing left out.
And in the soft dirt of the floor gapes a long, deep hole, lovingly
Sophia-sized. It does not seem fresh. It waited for a long time under her like
a mouth, while she moved and lived and brushed her hair above. The
invisible root of her being.
A space built just for her.
“So, you know,” Adam says behind her, and Sophia screams, no matter
how she might wish she hadn’t, might wish that she was beyond fearing
him now. “Pie smells good.” He sighs in disappointment. “Come on up and
we’ll talk.”
They sit together, not at the great table but on the floor, side by side. She
serves him a piece of the pie, glistening, steaming, perfect. He takes the
plate, sets it down between them, and doesn’t touch it.
“You were supposed to be different,” he says, and there is real anger in
it.
“I don’t understand,” Sophia ventures. She does, of course, but she
wants him to say it.
Adam throws up his prehistoric hands. “None of you ever do, until you
do, and then what am I supposed to do with you? Where does that leave
me? None of you ever think of that, not for a second. It’s always whining
and crying and what’s in the basement, Adam? Me, me, me! You’re all the
same.”
“I found the bones. And the hair and the blood and the jewelry,” Sophia
says haltingly, so that he will think she does not know the whole of it, and
her time might stretch a little longer.
Adam lifts his chin, refusing to be shamed. “I miss them. I loved them.”
His lip quivers. “Why should I give them up? I loved them so much. And
no one should have to live without the things they love. They’re mine,
anyway. I can do what I like. It’s not for you to say.”
Sophia’s eyes slip closed. This far. Why not farther? “You loved them
so much you used those knives in the cellar on them?”
“Oh,” Adam says sheepishly. He fiddles with his fork. “That.”
“Yes, that, Adam.”
He flinches at the sound of his name like she’s cut him.
“I was born a giant, you know,” he says, refusing to look up at her,
gazing anywhere but at his wife. “I was formed of the dust of the ground,