Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver EPUB & PDF – eBook Details Online
- Author: Barbara Kingsolver
- Language: English
- Genre: Contemporary Literary Fiction
- Format: PDF / EPUB
- Size: 2 MB
- Price: Free
First, I got myself born. A decent crowd was on hand to watch, and they’ve
always given me that much: the worst of the job was up to me, my mother
being let’s just say out of it.
On any other day they’d have seen her outside on the deck of her trailer
home, good neighbors taking notice, pestering the tit of trouble as they
will. All through the dog-breath air of late summer and fall, cast an eye up
the mountain and there she’d be, little bleach-blonde smoking her Pall
Malls, hanging on that railing like she’s captain of her ship up there and
now might be the hour it’s going down.
This is an eighteen-year-old girl
we’re discussing, all on her own and as pregnant as it gets. The day she
failed to show, it fell to Nance Peggot to go bang on the door, barge inside,
and find her passed out on the bathroom floor with her junk all over the
place and me already coming out. A slick fish-colored hostage picking up
grit from the vinyl tile, worming and shoving around because I’m still
inside the sack that babies float in, pre-real-life.
Mr. Peggot was outside idling his truck, headed for evening service,
probably thinking about how much of his life he’d spent waiting on
women. His wife would have told him the Jesusing could hold on a minute,
first she needed to go see if the little pregnant gal had got herself liquored
up again. Mrs. Peggot being a lady that doesn’t beat around the bushes and
if need be, will tell Christ Jesus to sit tight and keep his pretty hair on. She
came back out yelling for him to call 911 because a poor child is in the
bathroom trying to punch himself out of a bag.
Like a little blue prizefighter. Those are the words she’d use later on,
being not at all shy to discuss the worst day of my mom’s life. And if that’s
how I came across to the first people that laid eyes on me, I’ll take it. To
me that says I had a fighting chance. Long odds, yes I know.
If a mother is
lying in her own piss and pill bottles while they’re slapping the kid she’s
shunted out, telling him to look alive: likely the bastard is doomed. Kid
born to the junkie is a junkie. He’ll grow up to be everything you don’t
want to know, the rotten teeth and dead-zone eyes, the nuisance of locking
up your tools in the garage so they don’t walk off, the rent-by-the-week
motel squatting well back from the scenic highway.
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