5. over coming prejudice
The Apple From The Tree
It was the same path home, through blood.
She was the old walk through wheat before him—the shortcut taken, down to the unspun hair fallen to her shoulders, heavy from humidity as the day's last bale. He hated her, too—this daughter on his porchstep rolling her ankles with a flat chest that could only be so appealing in summer's sheen, under memory's dry-eyed willow. Asking if Theo was home, the goddamned brat. She was the same priestess with jabbering freckles to whom he'd confessed, merely separated by a generation.
Half her blood which wasn't his. Half a name which upheld its father-claim. Half the irreligious giggle, stifled under eaves. Half the kiss which wasn't his alone, and promised then the hemisphere of each cold, untampered breast.
No, he said. Not home.
When he watched her go, he tasted what was not yet bitter, which was memorable and strange and damning.
DA
I can tell from his skull's phrenology, freshly shaved to folds, knobs and bantering plates of bone that he could break my shins with the timbre of a displeased grunt. He puts his hands on the table, which is bolted to the ground and etched with messages, phone numbers, pleas and bored cunts. He has a stomping chest. Hands that have dealt with the slant rhyme of hay, truncheon hog-grunts. He looks like he probably tore through her like an ocean's suction. Of course, I knew as much from the file and the photographs, lewd with phosphorescence and looped bruise.
He looks down when I sit. Looks at his hands. Looks away because he can hardly stand it, fixes on me.
“Got a couple options.” I open my own hands for example.
“I aint teachable,” he says, doesn't look down again, for fear what I saw is true.
