Hazel Run, and: Catherine's Furnace, and: The Quarry, and: XXX, and: Flash, and: You Got to Pray to the Lord When You See Those Flying Saucers
I just entered you, he said. Like name it and claim it. The preacher on the radio winds his black stole around your eyes. Small red clots of language between my legs. This is where the girl was found. Hot Tramp. Down at the creek, carrying so much blood during the Battle of the Wilderness, the swollen banks burst. The children knew this history by instinct, war between brothers. Your body just obeyed, crouch and clinch, the reflex against another body in its strike. Before the violence of adulthood was the violence of childhood and before that a whole history of bloodshed as inheritance. We waded in the shallow waters, the flash and stab of pyrite and sunlight and the strike of the flint in our hands, all of it exploded ordnance, tracers of bullets to mark a place deeply as only war does. We were always injured down there in our woods, in the waters of our creek, ankles serrated, braceleted in barbed wire, our fingers stippled