A ghost one day filled an empty jug up to the rim in a sheep's blood. The sheep had gotten a hernia five days earlier, so on the fifth day of eating grass covered in its own blood, the sheep went to ask the ghost what to do. The ghost sat the sheep on the jug. Told him it would be okay. He went to his bedroom and came back with a gun, whereupon he shot the bleeding sheep in the head. Six years later I was born. The doctor hung my screaming little bloody body upside down, spanked me, and snipped the umbilical cord. My parents named me Elizabeth, but eventually everybody just called me Beth. My first memory is of catching fireflies with my brother in our backyard, while my mother and her mother watched. I was three years old. That was fourteen years ago. |