Evelyn
I don't want to go to the market today.
That's a lie. I want to go more than I've wanted anything in recent memory and that's exactly the problem.
I lie in bed longer than I should, staring at the ceiling, replaying the dream for the hundredth time since I woke up gasping in the dark. His voice. His hands. The way he said good girl like it was something he meant, like it was something I'd earned, like —
I press my palms flat against my face.
I am not doing this.
I get up. I dress. I go downstairs and I light the fires and I make the bread and I do all of it on a kind of automatic pilot that my body has developed over a multitude of mornings that required showing up regardless of what was happening inside me. My father says something about the south pasture fence needing attent
