Sixteen, she was sixteen, and this baby was upon birth approximately one-seventeenth her age. Realizing this, she held it, prepared to hold it until one of them gave. One of them gave. She held it, not letting it give, crushing it, cementing it to life, unbearably frigid in the aim of its movements, not fixed to the body itself but to the space allowing it motion, but then its respiration began to work in sputtering fits, rapidly leaving the holes of possibility, she holding it and saying please just be OK please please, you are you are what made things OK just be OK please, and its heart for all intents and purposes imploded, caving in and its breath-impoverished cries quieting, searching for space, unavailing, and then so it died but she held it, still saying the quiet and delicate things she had been saying for a long time.

He lived in Paris and was arrested and tried and he was convicted for the violent rape of a thirteen-year-old girl with blonde hair spread all over her body who frequently shaved the hairs off of the area encompassing her vagina like she was snuffing out a colony of ants. He attested in court that she practically begged for the abuse he gave her, his tragic defense, and even the physical pain. But then she wept inconsolably and his French was also poor syntactically and so then he hanged himself, waddling on the ceiling.

She eventually in age 19 married a man, a man who liked often to go work and who liked to drink and who liked to manufacture crystal methamphetamines in the living room and whose age was more commensurate with her own and who was attuned to the brief necessities of her person and they were peaceably situated, before he came home especially drunken one night and he stabbed her in the neck and the throat consecutively, as it were, with a blunt screwdriver, in a tiredly quaint and communal trailer park situated in eastern Tennessee, raising three children and later losing them on a clear spring day to men, who also often liked to go work, in important suits with shiny hair partitioned disproportionately in two. These three men, who enjoyed very much to work and to wear their important suits and to take the children of extremely bad negligent people like these, had heard rumors of all the bad things she and her husband had done, all of the things which neither could recall, done in the hours of nights spent supinely alone, lifeless in gesture and impressively silent. When these men in important suits took them the children cried for her and so did she cry, a lyrical cry for them and for herself and for her and for her fumbled will to keep them, to retain their frequent misery, now bereft of them, loving them but so unstoppably unable to hold on to, a sage of wandering, crying. If they were taken so she was taken, 21 and searching for razor blades in the unfurnished living room of her trailer.

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