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I would read every page of the book in your hand if I could open it. The photograph captures the spine and the glut of the hardback’s gilding, a sliver of page as careful and modest as the point of your white throat. You sit rigidly while your mind composes a decades-long poem to God. Specks of changed metal descend on your bookish cell. You ask questions regarding salvation, but I have no answers and merely take notes: transcendent bibliophile, alchemical, oddly dressed.

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If he could, this man would lecture me kindly on what I do not know and on what I know better than he. There is little that progress cannot teach us, he’d intone. Women are a certain thing, a certain way. His spectacles, small and wire, reveal my liberation, in which he partway believes.

What he does not see: the discoloration of his face framed with purple, then blue burst of chemical flower. His eyes untouched and shining from the center, beard trimmed but feral. The humanity in him stitched from something wild.

From his jacket an object emerges, a blankness or a book. It’s his auricle pulsing forth, the book he has written, the one that contains all the rules of his life and the love who was lost down river. She had never learned to swim, or swam too well.

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I have broken loose from my case. You toss me downriver like a lucky bottle and the glass green message I carry: these bonnets are damned uncomfortable, and without the love of God I’d never get through a day in one.

Don’t doubt a minute that my own heart hurt as Penelope walked along the bank searching for a proper switch. And as I struck her with it, I felt the fire myself: a punishment for us both. Better this now, I whispered, than for eternity. Feel your sharp sin now so there is time for repentance, and after that cake.

She didn’t go hungry. I fed my children no matter what they did. I would give it to them from my own mouth, my own wrist. You doubt, you question, as if you are not brutal. You chew the bird one century after I snapped its neck.

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A girl my daughter’s age, gypsy, stunning, utterly alert. Rings etched onto right-hand fingers reveal her early marriage to beauty and reckless dancing. A child of the bleak Midwest defies her dutiful bloodline, takes to wandering and asymmetrical curls. Wry lip closes over a mouthful. They have caught her for one minute, before her mind once again changes. Through her life she stores them up, the revelations, the heaven in hell. I am not sure who she tells. A playmate, husband, river, aunt, dying elm tree, mouthful of jam.

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