Demon Copperhead

by Barbara Kingsolver

When your parent clocks out before you clock in, you can spend way too much of your life staring into that black hole.

I can still feel in my bones how being mad was the one thing holding me together.

But I liked knowing what happened to me was real, with a name.

“Lonesome! Nothing lonesomer than getting shackled to a bully-man in his house of spite.”

She said before we were us, we weren’t anything.

First, I got myself born.