Demon Copperhead

by Barbara Kingsolver

Anybody will tell you the born of this world are marked from the get-out, win or lose.

Keeping secrets from young ears only plants seeds in between them,

going through life as mini-you will be as thrilling as finding dried-up jizz on the carpet.

A ten-year-old getting high on pills. Foolish children. This is what we’re meant to say: Look at their choices, leading to a life of ruin. But lives are getting lived right now, this hour, down in the dirty cracks between the toothbrushed nighty-nights and the full grocery carts, where those words don’t pertain. Children, choices. Ruin, that was the labor and materials we were given to work with. An older boy that never knew safety himself, trying to make us feel safe. We had the moon in the window to smile on us for a minute and tell us the world was ours. Because all the adults had gone off somewhere and left everything in our hands.

a person could get used to anything except hanging by the neck.

It hit me pretty hard, how there’s no kind of sad in this world that will stop it turning. People will keep on wanting what they want, and you’re on your own.

The landfill is where I figured out one of my main philosophies, that everybody alive is basically in the process of trading out their old stuff for different stuff, day in day out. The idea though is to be moving up the ladder, not down, like the McCobbs were. Landfill, pawnshops, Walmart.

living up to my potential. I had no fight with them. You get to a point of not giving a damn over people thinking you’re worthless. Mainly by getting there first yourself.

I didn’t feel like explaining how you get used to people looking at you like trash, so it’s hard to care what kind of trash you put on the trash every morning.

“Certain pitiful souls around here see whiteness as their last asset that hasn’t been totaled or repossessed.”

You see what people do with money if they have it, it’s two different universes. Theirs and ours.

The wonder is that you could start life with nothing, end with nothing, and lose so much in between.

Yes sir, it is. Hard to live, and hard to watch the opposite coming down the road at you.

Is it the hardest thing I’ve ever done? No. Just the hardest one I had any choice about. Getting clean is like taking care of a sick person, versus being the sick person. They get all the points for bravery, but they’re locked in. You have to get up every morning and decide again, in the cold lonely light of day, am I brave enough to stick this out?

His mistakes were no more than the common failing to see the worth of boys like me, beyond what work can be wrung out of us by a week’s end. Farm field, battlefield, football field. I have no words for that mess.