V’s body looked like it had been swallowed by the earth and spat out again. She lay twisted in the grass like a tossed-away doll, arms splayed cartoonishly and legs tangled beneath her. Her gray hair was knotted and clotted with mud, her red cardigan and black dress soaked with blood and rain. She’d lost a boot, and the patched woolen sock on her unshod foot made me think, incongruously, of the wicked witch in The Wizard of Oz, the one who gets pancaked under Dorothy’s house. I locked my focus there, on what I remembered of that old acid trip of a movie, on the worn toe of V’s striped sock, so
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