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29 Vanishing Lessons Cross your eyes when you look in the mirror: you have already disappeared. If that doesn’t work, gather the bones, mortar them with sugar, add a capful of whiskey and corn cake flour. Stamp flat into an iron pan and cover with Saran. Let rise overnight beneath the heat of the mosquito lamp. Bake in the morning at 110 degrees. Consider the pressure of Oklahoma humidity. Eat her. Then pretend you didn’t. Sweep the crumbs beneath the placemat. If that doesn’t work, build her a birdcage. Teach her to sing on the apple-wood swing. As she sleeps, plink marbles from her shattered glass sky. She will dream of the rain. She will wake with blue bruises. She will remember nothing. To offer just enough hope to fatten her, pull the lightbulb rope two hundred miles across the plains. Plug it in by her bed, say: this is for our ancestors. When the moon is electric it may go out too. 30 If that doesn’t work, teach her to read, to enunciate the words infidel and whore. Teach her grammar and politics, the danger of the sun. Take her to the museum, say this is where you come from. Then send her to the curbside up the hill from her ghosts. Tell her to wait with a bouquet of plastic roses, that they will all come back if she stays very still. ...

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