ABSTRACT
The viscosity, the heat, the oil drips down my cheek, as I sit; my feet barely reach the floor. My mother is performing a ritual, exorcising an evil spirit that she told me was put into me because of some other little girl's jealousy. The exorcism begins with me in a chair up against the kitchen sink. I look up into her face over me, into the small black centers of her eyes. My mother is doing what I know only the ordained were meant to do. I am frightened but fascinated too. I do not move. So it always seemed that even before I was I, God was displeased with me, 1 having been found guilty of some sort of receptivity or complicity. If only I could, I would place my big sister there, to sit beside me, hold my hand and insist we both resist my mother. Instead there is only loneliness in my sister's inability to attend to me; her means of psychic survival would seem to be a denial of a mutual infection of wounds.
