Immaculate

Who doesn’t wish calamity upon the people who brought them into this sphere of calamities to begin with.

IT WAS A BIG GODDAMNED LAND. COULD FLY TO PARIS OR LONDON IN THE time it took to drive the distance between Harris and Castro counties. Not that Mae had ever been to the Old World. She told herself she had no need to go, that this world was plenty old enough and its age could be known through the deep secret burials locked like so many xenocrysts in the rock beneath. ¶ She was trembling and it wasn’t just the old roads in need of tarring. It was the thing inside her, and she felt sick-certain it was the thing inside her that caused the cement to buckle as she drove over it, like little her and her little car were some broiling force of choler and dudgeon come to exact a price, and the ground itself split in submission. And she felt that way of course because it was so. The roads had been fine yesterday when she’d come.

She’d planted the seed for seedless Reed. She could choose now to water it or excise it—she knew well the way to do the latter and no doctor necessary, she had womantaught and Godsanctioned tricks no man and no man’s law could undo—though she knew she would not uproot it now that she’d done the sowing. That wasn’t the way of a rancher’s daughter, and she was every bit a rancher’s daughter and had proven it to herself for good this time. No: Now it