Come fall, the river acts like it’s sorry. It slinks below its banks, doglike, showing its belly. I’m not fooled. I remember how proud it was in summer, when it lifted cars and couches to its shoulders, when it coated Emma’s coats in celebratory slime, when catfish spawned in the baseball diamond, happy as drunks.

Some men are painting my house. While they paint, they talk about women.

“I like ‘em with long legs,” says one of the men. “Not big bellies. Long legs.”

Later he says he does not believe in cheating. At first I think he is chivalrous.

Then he says, “People think when you sleep with someone else, you’re rejecting them. But you can only reject yourself.”

This man appears in my window and needs help with something. He needs me to hold the screen while he bashes himself against it. Afterwards, he smiles at me, and I see that even though I do not have long legs, I am part of Women.

A day will come when I will not be part of that kind of Women anymore, and I wonder what I will think then when men paint my house. Probably they will still talk about women and I will be angry. But I hope instead I listen to them the way I listened to the children doing a crossword on the Greyhound bus, trying to decide where to put the ‘n’ in ‘cloud.’

You’re probably wondering about the mess. First of all, the red stuff is goat blood. When you live on a farm you have access to this kind of thing. I did not even have to kill the goat. At least, she seemed alive when I left her. You might also notice some kitty litter and ripped up newspaper. These I bought at the local drugstore; we do not have cats on the farm.

What do we have on the farm, you might ask — besides a bleeding goat, that is. Well, we have chores. “Slopping” is one of our chores. There is also “gutting.” And “blutting.” You do not want to know what “blutting” is. I’m not sure if this is a normal type of farm, but if so I would urge you to think twice every time you buy produce.

I know you sent me here so that I could “shape up,” and I guess you could say I’ve been doing that. I have learned a lot from the other kids here. I have, for instance, mastered many techniques of burning, branding, and flaying. You’ll notice I didn’t employ any of these techniques on our/your house this time around. I am saving them.

I hope you and Janie and Christian are doing well. I know that you would never send them away like you sent me, but if you do, I think you should consider a different farm, or perhaps a different type of shaping-up place altogether. I do not think Janie and Christian would do well here. I will not tell you specifically what has happened to the kids who are more “polite” or “well-behaved,” but I will say that these qualities seem to be valued less here than they apparently were at our/your home.

Actually I am glad to have found a place where qualities that come more naturally to me are valued and even celebrated, at least by my peers. The people in charge here, of course, have views more similar to yours. This is why I have had to leave. I have, however, had the chance to build up an extended network of like-minded people who have promised to aid me in my future endeavors. So thank you for providing me with this opportunity, and thank you, too, for all of the things you always said I should be grateful for. I can’t remember what they are just now, but I’m sure you do, and I’m sure they will be a great comfort to you in the months and years ahead.

Hope you’re enjoying this nice weather,
Spanky

Bread molds before the expiration date: someone will catch a cold this winter.

The dishtowel has a hole in it: something missing will be found.

Scissors fall with their blades shut: a guest is coming.

Scissors fall with their blades open: someone is having murderous thoughts.

This story is part three of three. Part two is “Emily’s Notes.”

Kids are always putting me in their pictures. I don’t mind; I feel for them. Their fathers, doctors, hand-wringing mothers — they all get it wrong. I’m not what goes into their crooked little skulls. I am what comes out.

This story is part two in a series. Part one is “Sociopath’s Notes.”

After they took her I went back to my old name. I cut my hair close to my scalp, gave up milk, became austere. I had lived so long in a parody of boldness.

“You can’t hurt me,” I would shout whenever I caught her behind me on the stairs.

Did it hurt that we looked so much alike? So that I was like a seedling started from the same stock, five years later?

Listen, I never learned to call that presence “sister.” She didn’t share my face, my narrow hips, my belly button nubbin. She wore them, like a tree wears the body of a bird that dies in it.

I committed my first murder the night my sister was born. They were going to name her Emily. I found a rabbit in the backyard and I pulled the ears off and waited for her to die. Afterwards they named my sister Charlotte instead and I knew it was because of me but I didn’t know how. In therapy I drew pictures of a big dark bird coming into my head. Then I drew myself with my arms up, batting the bird away. I knew what to draw so they would let me out of therapy. There was never any bird.

When my sister was six months old I burned her face with a magnifying glass. I told her if she moved I would stop, but she didn’t move. She just looked up at me like a fat gob of love. When I say I will do something, I have to do it.

They always ask me if “I have remorse.” Remorse I understand. My trouble is with “I” and “have.” Sometimes I am aware of feelings living near me. They are like shy roommates — they never speak to me, and when I enter a room they leave.

When my period came again, a day ahead of schedule, I carved myself a baby out of cheese. I only had enough for the head at first, so I had to go out and get two more blocks and melt the whole thing together with a candle. You probably want to know what kind of cheese I used. Cheddar. Brie was too soft; Swiss would have made him look pockmarked, and the other children would have made fun of him. Of course, I know he isn’t a real baby. I have named him Bobraham.

It’s amazing how much you can do with a cheese baby. I dress him in a little hat; I push him in a stroller. I take him to the park and the other women coo over him. They freak out when I let them get close, but that is pretty much how people react to me, too. I tell Bobraham not to worry. Yes, I talk to him. It’s actually weirder not to.

Oh, I worry though. There are lots of things to stress out about with Bobraham that you wouldn’t have to consider with a real baby. Mold, for instance. I cut it off with a little paring knife. It doesn’t hurt him. Then there’s always the issue of melting. Luckily Bobraham was born in the winter, so we have a couple of months to plan for that. I am thinking ice packs.

And of course there’s the question of a father. I am a traditional woman; I think a baby, especially a boy baby, needs a male role model. This, as you may have guessed, is why I am writing to you. I think you will find me and Bobraham very easy to live with. He is quiet, naturally, and you can eat bits of him if you get hungry in the night. As for me, not everyone considers me attractive, and many people have described me as strange. But I am the type of woman who does what she can with what she has, and over time I think you will come to find this appealing.

The night was so silent, to speak felt like tossing a stone down a deep well.

“How’s your wife?” I asked, and then winced at the echoes.

“Tired,” said Edson. “Teddy’s not a good sleeper. You know how it is.”

“They start going the whole night when they’re eleven months or so,” I told him. “At least, Skipper did. Until then Megan was up feeding her all the time.”

Edson smiled. “So we got ten months to go.”

A rabbit stopped in the snow in front of the plows. It turned its shocked eyes on us, flicked its ears.

“It looks like an alien,” I said.

“Everything does, in this snow.”

He was right. In the moonlight our skins were silver.

“I haven’t seen you in a long time,” I told him. “Not since September.”

He took a step towards me and put his hand on the back of my neck. The leather pad of his glove was cold. Then we both got in our snowplows and drove away.

When my sister’s baby was born with no legs, just little toes coming out of her hips, and my brother went out for a drink and came back with viral meningitis, and my father started raving about a railroad yard, my mother blamed the wind. And when my father left and my mother too went crazy and carved into every wooden surface of our house a name that wasn’t hers or his, a name I’d never heard before, I asked what she was doing. She made me get down the dictionary.

“Simoom,” I read, “a hot, wet wind prevalent in Israel, Saudi Arabia, and Syria.”

I looked up at her as she ground a double “o” into the cupboards.

“We don’t live in Syria, Mom.”

She hit my knuckles with the flat side of the knife. Later I went down to the river and watched the ice break into chunks and roll downstream. It was the third of January and fifty-nine degrees. Even the birds were killing each other. I stomped on the slushy ground to break up a scrum of Canada geese; they flew off screaming like pigs. On the feathered ground lay the last one, flayed and heaving. I knelt to look at her.

“My sister’s baby has no legs,” I said, “and my brother’s cooking in his own blood. My dad left and my mom is carving up our house with a word I can’t pronounce.”

The hot, wet wind blew a gust in my face. The goose lifted up her head and made a sound like the memory of a goose. I saw that she wanted me to kill her.

“No way,” I said. “Too much of that already.”

I held her in my arms and I took her home, where my mother had carved everything there was to carve. We put the goose in the bathtub and wound her around with toilet paper. We lit a candle next to her head. My mother and I took turns watching her that night. In the morning she was dead, but the wind had stopped, and my father came home smelling like coal and dust and rubber. At first we thought he’d lost his speech; then we gave him oatmeal and he began telling the old jokes again. My brother’s fever broke that morning too. By nightfall he was sitting up and drinking broth from a mug.

My sister’s baby was the only one of our family who didn’t survive the simoom. She died in the evening, silent, while we were looking in the Bible for her name. We buried her and the goose at sunrise, just before the snows came back and locked up the ground again.