I wasn’t actually thinking this but it came up later: if I had been building a dragon, it would breathe fire and kill people because it was angry, and because breathing fire is what dragons do. I myself wasn’t angry that way, see, as anger was never allowed in our home. Even ‘Off Fighting America’s Enemies,’ my father said, there was no place for anger there, either. You had to be in control. It was okay if a woman got angry, wasn’t it cute, how sweet and silly and endearing, but a man had to control that sort of girly thing.
I was vaguely aware that behind a superficial, acted-out emotion, there is often a second emotion, the real one, hiding behind the first like a great porcupine fish hiding behind a wall of coral like they do, or a turtle hiding under a shelf of lava, like they do. I
