Demon Copperhead

by Barbara Kingsolver

gone to bed and gotten up again, situation normal. Eating cereal now. All the kids with moms that had their shit together and dads that were alive.

Nine minutes to go. I didn’t want to be in that kitchen, and didn’t want to go back to the farm. I sat still, trying to be nothing and nowhere,

I was wishing so hard for him to give a damn, and also for him to disappear from the planet of Earth. I wished both those things at the same time. And wish number three, not to be the eleven-year-old redheaded boy that everybody saw crying at the burger place on Route 58.

I put my face to the window so nobody would see, if I tore up. Was this me now, for life? Taking up space where people wished I wasn’t? Once on a time I was something, and then I turned, like sour milk. The dead junkie’s kid. A rotten little piece of American pie that everybody wishes could just be, you know. Removed.

We both lay back down, and she looked at me in the eyes, and we were sad together for a while. I’ll never forget how that felt. Like not being hungry.

I wanted no sun shining on me now. I erased myself like a chalkboard. In

I wanted to go home. Which was nowhere, but it’s a feeling you keep having, even after that’s no place anymore. Probably if they dropped a bomb and there wasn’t any food left on the planet, you’d still keep feeling hungry too.

I’d started to see how being big for your age is a trap. They send you to wherever they need a grown-up body that can’t fight back.

If I stayed here, would I turn into one of these Jonesville Middle School babies? Not something to worry about, I knew. Nobody ever kept me that long.

Aunts standing close in the kitchen like cigarettes in the pack, uncles splayed on furniture like butts in the ashtray.