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There is a wooden table in a breeze-scrubbed room.

Winter has brought its first breath like small knives, pricking her skin as the glass quietly knocks against the oak surface. Milk slops to the upper edge, the rocking steadied by a silver spoon that breaks apart the cornbread and honey until the mixture churns like her stomach.

"Thank you," she does not say.

The gifter leans accusingly into the table's edge, grinning in anger.

The last words spoken hang in the air.

"Do you want me to ask you a third time," a curse spat to the side.

"I'd honestly prefer you didn't."

It wouldn't matter, in any case. There are no quick words here,no silver from alchemy. Her tongue is lead.

If one must be hung for a lamb...

The cream and honey, flour,
is as cloyingly sweet as the pun is sour.

The curved edges of the room loop like razor wire.

"Well, Rachel, do you live in the real world?"



There is an ash on her front lawn; she took her books there to a limb curled against the roof years ago when climbing trees was not particularly a girl thing or a boy thing.

It wasn't allowed then, either, but for a few hours the upper branches could claw up through the stratosphere,
and the roots sapped oceans on the other side of the earth.
There was enough space to hold the world, and eight besides.



Her mother, in her youth, in Arkansas, dug until she reached red dirt. Down to the devil, she would still laugh.