My mother pulled my hair. I had brought her the Cosmopolitan but it was the wrong month. She wasn't drunk, then. She was trying so hard not to be. I remember walking in Chicago and someone saying to his friend or partner, "It makes a huge difference whether or not your parents sacrificed their lives for you." I interrupted, "That's a fucking lot to ask." He kept walking and didn't answer. My mother pulled my hair and threw me down the stairs. My elbow broke in a place that made it never quite right. It always ached, and I always felt it there, like the phantom limb of amputees.

I should've gone to the hospital, but I didn't want anything to happen to her. I drove to the cornfield near Big Daddy's, the bar where she danced and years later they would find her, strung up in the corn on a pole like a scarecrow. They'd never find her killer. It was how the world saw her—a dancer, a drunk, a dead thing already.

So I held my arm and looked at all that buried corn. The crust of snow held a blackbird aloft. The lone figure in the field that morning, me in my car, ready to gun the engine, pull the trigger, a ton of other desires buried inside. A silent dark thing. Why not fly? The blackbird walked on its stick legs and maybe in the afternoon the world would soften, but not then. Then the world felt hard, like forgiveness.