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I flinched. She’d always called me “Needy” as a joke—because my name was Nidia, and I clung to her like a life raft. But now it sounded like a diagnosis.
The night the fire department pulled two rabbit hunters out of a ravine, no one in Devil’s Kettle talked about the smell on their breath. The hunters said they’d been chasing a buck, lost their footing, and blacked out. But the nurses noted the way their chests caved in—like something had sat on them and gotten bored.
I picked up her hairbrush. It was crusted with something dark at the bristles. “The thing inside you. Can you feel it?”
The cops ruled it a gas leak. The town buried her on a Tuesday. I stood at the grave until everyone left, then I carved into her headstone with the same scissors: