Demon Copperhead

by Barbara Kingsolver

to face the family.

They needed somebody alive to tell the tale.

and we all agreed there would be no getting over this. Hammer w...

Like if they hashed through it enough times, they might get to a different ending.

For over a month now I’d been sleeping in Maggot’s top bunk, and it had

been pretty much like the sleepovers of our numbskull boyhood days, with better drugs.

Everett

Emmy

Mariah

June

But she was the head of the family now. She would lead the charge this time on getting lawyered up for Maggot.

You didn’t start this fire.”

dipped off.

because going nowhere fast is a kind of juice.

A guy could take this to mean he ought to be dead.

I hadn’t smoked much weed since Dori died, just not feeling it.

Hard to explain the various levels of doping hell, but there’s a dark territory past the pleasures that weed is

made...

because life was not a total and complete dumpster fire, which she was wrong about.

and watched the sun melt into the Cumberlands. Layers of orange like a buttermilk pie cooling on the horizon.

Every cricket that inched along the cave face was a

copperhead,

Dalit, is the word he was saying all

that time.

The Halley Library branch on the north end of Knoxville was the other half of my halfway life,

after I graduated from detox-and-therapy boot camp,

learned respect for properly dosed Suboxone u...

my residency si...

Mariah

The pillars of my sanity in hard-knocksville were three guys

Vi...

G...

Chart...

The Knoxville treatment enterprise

draws from a wide watershed of humanity.

all the human eyes that wouldn’t look at us, out on the city streets.

I taught myself to save the juice.

None of this did he owe to the Veterans Administration that was paying his way.

I’m going to tell you something, there’s country poor, and there’s city poor.

to pinpoint the moment where everything starts to fall apart. Everything, meaning me.

where some little nut cracks open inside you and a tree starts to grow.

Mr. Armstrong,

School Counselor, also English Teacher and married to art teacher miss Annie

Tommy

Still reading books, and emailing me about the books and ideas he got from the books,

Our Red Neck strip went on ice for a time.

We all want what we’re used to.

My weird cartoons got a little following that grew, and after a year I sold subscriptions.

Mr. Dick

the pink

pill I put under my tongue every