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She looks up and nods
“When do those bastards take the girls back to the mine?”
“In theAnd they don’t fly when the satellites are overhead They’ll keep…” Her lips quiver like salted slugs “They keep the wives in the base until they pass Be on ten usually”
“Then you got till daybreak to h to drop a drillboy’s jaw,” I say “Can you do that? Gimme a little blush, curl this nest?”
She s she knows
“Little oil and an iron I got one just behind the cupboard”
“Good, Maeve Good And I’ot”
BY MORNING, I’M SCHLEPPING over the frosted snoard the base, trying not to liht and blue out and pretty enough forsuch a lovely face on such a shit-infested day
The sea lolls against the coast like a dancing gray lover It spits little bursts of salt that coast up in the air and then drizzle down on ht be all closed up to a world that’s beaten the hell out of whatever pretty dream she had for herself when she was freed froenocide look like a du skirts and nothin’ to her knowin’ except how to coax fatass spiders into puking silk and how to get rustblood drillboys spitting seed enough to populate a township
I stride dohat counts as the ot soot a bundle under my arm It ain’t the orb I left that buried in the cinders, and Ulysses with Maeve All I got is a bucket of salted fish fro for the Red Hand butcherboys set about their rayline They make like bees to me No manners They’re conquerors What they see is theirs And they’re wondering how the Picker didn’t already take his wife tax of me
They pester about, asking questions I act all do about like I’aps in the trees They pullon They hem me in and coax me into a smoke I take a burner betweeninside the cheek, nearly where the azine of teeth are secured by epoxy to my deeper parts I act tinetiset jealous, and the biggest shoulders the other aside
“Never had a burner,” I say dozily to Biggest
“We got ’es I try not to tongue ray ht there, or maybe aim a little lower Another part feels bad for the stupid bastard He’s pi because he’s got a gun and big hands and big shoulders But the dun sitting there with a cup of tea and the weight of ten billion on her He’s never seen Victra standing there like a god giving life to a baby that’d change the world if he ever got the chance to grow If the dumb bastard did have a notion of his true size, he’d cruly small he actually is
&nb
sp; I kno small I am But I also kno small they are