Salvage the Bones Read Online Free PDF Page A

white in the gloom. But still, it is work, and I have to pull myself back and concentrate to find anything to eat.
    The only thing that’s ever been easy for me to do, like swimming through water, was sex when I started having it. I was twelve. The first time was laying down on the front seat of Daddy’s dump truck. It was with Marquise, who was only a year older than me. Skeetah’s closest friend, he was so close to the both of us that he basically lived at our house during the summers. The three of us would run out back and get lost in Daddy’s woods, would spend days floating in the water in the Pit on our backs. We spent the summer dusted an orange color, and when we woke up every day of our months-long sleepover, the sheets would feel powdery like dry red clay. We were in the dump truck hiding from Skeetah, waiting for him to find us, and Marquise asked if he could touch my titty. They were growing then, but still small as the peaks of cream on lemon meringue pie with hard knots at the middle. I let him, and then he asked me to show him my private because he was scared he was going to never see one when he got older. I did. And then he started touching me, and it felt good, and then it didn’t, but then it did again. And it was easier to let him keep on touching me than ask him to stop, easier to let him inside than push him away, easier than hearing him ask me, Why not? It was easier to keep quiet and take it than to give him an answer. Skeetah found us after. I was sweating so badly my eyes were stinging, and some of it was Marquise’s sweat, who was half smiling and then not, his eyes big at what we’d done. What was y’all doing? Skeetah asked, and I said, Nothing . It smelled like boiled milk in the truck. I was afraid that Skeetah could smell it, could smell Marquise and me, the way we slid together, all elbows and knees, bones and skin, Marquise’s face shocked and grinning and dirty, so I slid out of the cab first, and I left them looking around for a grill they could drag into the woods to cook Spam that Marquise had stolen from his house; we were supposed to camp out that night.
    In the bathroom, I looked at myself in the mirror. Undressed and rinsed. Dressed again. My clothes fit the same. My stomach, my hips, my arms all fell in the same straight lines; there was nothing fine or curvy about me. I was still short and skinny, my hair big and curly and black, my lips thin. I didn’t look any different. Daddy taught every one of us to swim by picking us up when we was little, around six or so, and flinging us in the water. I’d taken to it fast, hadn’t coughed up the muddy pit water, hadn’t cried or flailed; I’d bobbed back up and cut the surface of the water and splashed my way back to where Daddy was standing in the shallows. I’d pulled the water with my hands, kicked it with my feet, let it push me forward. That was sex.
    The chicken eggs in my shirt are warm as stones, but light, too light to be the color of rocks. I expect them to be heavy as the clay pebbles that share their color, to pull me down in the front. They don’t. I’ve seen frog eggs that turn into tadpoles; in the springtime the ditches around the property are alive with them. When me and Skeet were little we’d lay on our stomachs over the ditches and reach into them and pull up some of the eggs, hold them close so we could see if the little wormy frogs in them had begun to shake, to squirm, to turn long and pointed to spear their way out. When they look like hundreds of little shut eyeballs still, they are lighter than light, cool as a breeze. I wonder if inside eggs, the kind that need the shelter of a body—horse eggs, pig eggs, human eggs—are so light. Would they look clear as jelly with firefly hearts, or would they look as solid and silent as stone? Would they show their mystery, or would they cover it like a secret? Would a human egg let itself be