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368 pages, Hardcover
First published May 21, 2024
Jeanie shakes her head and says Kittentits, you are so totally busted. You are so totally broken. It’s all over you, she says. Think about it, she goes. You floated in her nine months which in baby-time is forever. The beat of her heart was the first sound you heard. She was the universe you soaked in and the one you clawed out of and you lost her so early it formed you completely, so completely it’s invisible because it’s all you’ve ever known. But I can see it, Crotchtard.
The day Jeanie comes old fat Evelyn comes in, says No sass talk today, Molly, this is what you’re wearing. Meaning these side-striped shorts, this puff-painted shirt she puff-painted. Spongy letters floating across my nips saying Welcome, Welcome. Yellow puff bees buzzing around the letters, my nips. All this for Jeanie, the first Resident Friend since the fire, our first Resident Correctional Friend ever at the fire-rotted, nunhaunted House of Friends: a Semi-Cooperative Living Community of Peace Faith(s) in Action. I’d like to barf oceans on this shirt. I’d like to make some whiny kid put it on then barf on it while Jeanie watched and the whiny kid cried. That’s how you welcome someone the day she gets out of prison. That’s how you make her feel at home in her new halfway house where for eighteen months the state of Illinois requires her to live.
This is how I learned what’s what. How to be a little girl in the world and be seen and heard. To live a life of glory that dignifies your suffering. It’s all about talking, it’s about how you speak. If you want to be badass and powerful you have to know the right way to speak. I wasn’t born knowing and neither were you. I had to learn and it wasn’t gradual, it was all the sudden. A lightning strike, a thunderclap, a slap on the cheek.
I’m the ghost-friended badass who snuck into Mombie’s dressing room, I’m a preteen hellion who emits her own scent: the awesome stink of a girl who bites, the blood-muddied funk of the bramble cats! In Grandpa Hack’s Horror Mirrors each mirror shows you killed a different way, but no matter the mirror, no matter the wound, no matter stabbed all over, tractor-crushed, or drowned, I look wild and dirty always, a dirt bike gang’s kitten. Someone waiting to sink rabies into the steak of your neck.