IN THOSE DAYS WE
and a gray pebble in the starch. Because when the hogs started their violent sounds the girls ran from the room where they were doing each other’s hair in braids like twisted bread. And on the porch the noise tripled and the smear on each hog’s face was reddish brown and raw looking and screaming. The boy there at the well, buckets in hands, locked in place, a mute attached to his lungs. And their father leaning one hand on the wall of the barn, another on his hip pocket, a stalk of grass shooting from his teeth and lips. And their mother behind them all, bracing herself in the doorway, her knuckles white as snow in early winter, when it falls in a covering like pieces of the sky.
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