No One Will Miss Her

by Kat Rosenfield

He gave me what he could, and the mistakes he made were out of ignorance, not meanness. Even when he was drunk, and he was drunk plenty, he never raised a hand or said a cruel word.

Picking on someone his own size would have taken a kind of integrity he just didn’t have.

Then you’d spend the rest of your life finding little things to crush.

It seemed beautiful to me. And even the ugly parts, that line of stacked cars or the piles of busted junk, seemed like something exciting, dangerous, a little mysterious. I hadn’t figured out yet that I was supposed to be ashamed—of the trailer or the heaps behind it, of our cheap furniture, of the way Pop would pluck toys or books out of the boxes of crap people left at the junkyard, clean them up, and present them to me at Christmas or birthdays all wrapped up with a bow on top. I didn’t know they were

didn’t know we were trash.

like a uniform that allowed members of the city’s female leisure class to know one another in the wild. A closer look revealed that they were in fact wearing the same leggings, in slightly different cuts.

Copper Falls was a place where your role was assigned early and permanently; once people had decided who you were, they’d simply never allow you to be anyone else. Your label was what it was, for better or for worse.

the endless saga of deferred dreams,