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Almost Clean Knees patched with inner tube, tomorrow’s coveralls stiffen on the line. Today’s boil in a kettle next to the collards. My father’s body, taut as wire, hunches over a washtub, face black with dust. His body wears the repentant purple of Lent after every shift of work. I wear this smudge of ash, the reverend’s dry kiss marking my withdrawal from the world. The whistle sounds, and the graveyard shift begins their clean descent into the ground. I wash my father’s back. He turns, wipes the ash from my forehead with his wet palm, looking out the window at light spreading like water over the slate dump. In the evening, the moon rises from the river, curling across dirty sky. Then it drops behind the bluffs, slips back into the channel, tumbling all day along the bottom in the current, around the bend, past Cattail Slough all the way up to the ferry, until it falls into that deep hole off Mashburn Point. The crawfish and minnows pick at what’s left of the night’s stain. The next evening the moon floats up again, bone white. 16 ...

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