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18 The Elderberries I picked the elderberries because I was poor and an orphan, and falsely accused. I picked the purple elderberries belonging to that woman who watched me with suspicion, and recorded all my crimes. My crime that day was theft. Theft, and hunger, and ingratitude. I picked the purple berries and ate them and licked the stain of them from my hands, and the seeds, and ate the little leaves that stuck to my fingers and sucked at the collar of my dress where juices ran down and left a dark stain on the cotton. A drop of elderberry fell through the leaves onto the back of a box turtle who crawled away, bearing that testimony. I ran and hid behind the tool and die factory where men were honing molds in the whining spasms of a steel saw. The sound hurt my ears. I raised my arms to cover them and saw my hands cut off, a dark stain pumping methodically from my wrists, spilled on to the ground. She would have no use for me now. And as I was poor and an orphan, must I then be sacrificed? I pressed my wrists together, cut to cut to staunch the blood, to stay the surge, the flux that would have emptied out my heart. 19 I gave up my arms like vines to this fusion; I tied myself into a knot, a liana rooted to myself. I gave up reaching, became the one who could not claim or hold. I was that determined to live. ...

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