Demon Copperhead

by Barbara Kingsolver

And look, no red-blooded boy wants to be Little Anything. Advice to anybody with the plan of naming your kid Junior: going through life as mini-you will be as thrilling as finding dried-up jizz on the carpet.

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.

Ms. Annie said all God’s children have to take a shit, but you’d never know it from the way they treat the ones that clean it up.

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

Her laugh bubbled up. Like a glove box popping open and candy spilling out.

Many had tried their best with us, but we came out of too-hungry mothers. Four demons spawned by four different starving hearts.

The Bible says love your neighbor and you have to think city people have their ways of it, but in the two days we were there I saw no evidence. Closed blinds, the sound of dogs barking.

Two dead wasps lay on the sill with their heads close together like a tiny murder-suicide.

A big old apple tree stood out in the yard, and that summer we ate wormy apples off the ground. I can still see her, so hungry, dirt on her knees, kneeling on the ground in a dead person’s housedress.

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