Married or dead. My mother’s two choices. She wanted more for me, a different life, but not too different. In that moment in the kitchen, I became the other, the witch, the worm that spoils the crop. I became destroyable, if only for the duration of my mother’s madness, when she fell out of herself and stopped seeing me as her child. This happens sometimes when ordinary people come face-to-face with a person who loosens the gender boundaries of the body. They go crazy, the ground beneath them giving way. If such a fracture could split me from my mother and put the wish for murder in her mouth,
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