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SUMMER WASPS
- University of Arkansas Press
- Chapter
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SUMMER WASPS That was the summer I lay on my mattress watching the wasps skim my window screen the way they did the eyelashes of the girl whose body we found beneath the overpass. We were still children, thin and flat, and thought nothing of how she’d arrived, only fascinated by what she was then—blood cooled beneath her skin, her dark hair, wind-knotted, face swelling all those days we dared each other to walk past, holding our breath, not knowing what the stink meant. Finally, the rain-worn garbage bags, a black cocoon that contained her body, split open. When the policeman came, he taped off the site, said we couldn’t play there anymore and anyway why would we want to, did we know something about this, he said, dead body, and I discerned a dead body: cars thrumming past, ants channeling in skin, the indecipherable code of the wind—no spirit loosed like a veil, no heaven opening to call her home, her eyes blue as a sky that overlooks nothing. The milky eyes of blindness. The gray stare of roads, the roads I walked on so far away from there I could never find my way back and by then I was a woman so anyway why would I want to; I knew something about that. ...