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55 Danse Macabre, Mississippi: My Great-Grandmother Fires a BB Gun There were black-eyed Susans loose at the hip, the limp magnolia blooms worked to a quiver. There were white necks of her Belgian hens sent cracking. The day Baby Grace died from strep throat, my great-grandmother chased her son into their magnolia’s manic tier, fired lead pellets at the soles of his loafers. That day she laid down her bouquet-patterned wedding china in the zucchini patch and stomped. There were bare feet in her garden, as her garden grew gardenia-struck teeth—flung shards. My grandfather’s lungs pulsed like a monarch on a stone. Later, he will smoke for fifty years, become a shrink. From the tree he heard her shelling pistachios—a sound like someone’s back teeth grinding in nightmare. There were pistachios gone brittle, blue at the lip. His mother, pacing, craved salt as her daughter cooled under the quilt. There were faceless Dutch girls in patterns on the quilt, swallowed in bonnets, each one distant from the others, as if lost 56 in so many separate snowfields. There were voids around each one the shape of the distance between a boy in the top of a magnolia and his mother’s salty breath over her BB gun. There were tranquilizers so heavy for years, her tongue kept thrusting. Grandfather, it must never have been still. ...

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