I.
She always had mud under her nails. Her daddy had a crawfish farm and he built their house right on top of it. He preached that everything he ever needed came from the mud. There was a rumor was that one night her momma and daddy heard crying out in the pond, so they followed the wail and found a baby, covered in mud, crawling out of a crawfish hole. I sure as hell believed it; her otherness was bewitching.

II.
After Sunday school, we would sit on her back porch and eat ham and mayonnaise sandwiches. We dedicated our mouths to bunny bread rather than frivolous confabulation. It was so silent that you could hear the crawfish bubbling in the mud. I still can’t boil water without my knees going weak. The bubbling water sounds far too much like those Sunday lunches.

III.
Her skin was like milk, but her face was decorated with dark, splotchy freckles. She told me that she could remember God painting them on her in heaven. I didn’t believe her because I knew they had to be stains from the mud of the crawfish pond in which she spent her fetal life. She was so small. Her knees and elbows looked as if they could tear through her skin. Her chest was flat.

IV.
She was a product of the sun and the Gulf of Mexico; the earth birthed her under the Louisiana moon. It was not unusual to find her dancing alone in the fields wearing nothing but a white tank top and her underwear. She loved her portable radio, she loved the grass, she loved the cows, and the cows loved her.

V.
Once in June, the two of us were playing with the hose in my backyard when she asked me, “Are you gonna shave it?” Her stinging eyes were fixated on my body. I looked down and noticed the dark hair peeping out from the bottom of my swimsuit and on my thighs. “Am I supposed to?” I asked. “Jose told me that’s how he likes it,” She replied. Jose helped out on her daddy’s farm. He was 17 years old. She liked to work with them after she got out of school, most days.

VI.
I always feel sick after it rains in the summer. She loved the smell it left. She would make me lie down on the street with her, cheek to the ground. We stayed there for hours. Now, I find the smell the steaming concrete releases nauseating.

VII.
She showed me the bruises on her thighs and told me that Jose gave them to her. She told me that he loves her. I didn’t understand why Jose would hurt her if he loved her. I would never hurt her.

VIII.
Jose was sent to work on a sugar cane plantation in Natchitoches. She didn’t cry, but she refused to change clothes. She stayed in the same tank top and her favorite pair of underwear and nothing else. Every day she showed up to school wearing nothing and every day she was sent home. Her momma said she needed time to heal. I brought her the algebra homework and reading assignments after school. We sat on the porch and isolated variables as we ravaged a bucket of strawberries. Sweet juice dripped down our stained hands and onto our notebooks. I attempted to distract her with impressions of boys in our neighborhood. We laughed until our stomachs cramped and tears rolled down our cheeks and our burning lungs could no longer produce an audible laugh. We caught our breath and regained our surroundings. She looked me deeply in the eyes and then suddenly stood up. She pulled her tank top over her head and peeled her dirty, baby pink underwear with a little bow on the waistband off. She stood across from me, stark naked. I looked at her body; her hair was beginning to grow back. It poked through her skin like blades of black grass. After waiting a moment, she turned, opened the screen door, and walked off the porch into the crawfish pond. There were no stars to shine on the pond that night; I watched as the darkness swallowed her whole. I heard her feet squish into the mud three times. After that, all I could hear was the crawfish bubble.