Status Updates From Salvage the Bones

It was easier to keep quiet and take it than to give him an answer.

I knelt and stared for glass, wondered if I could find the piece that had cut me.

You got to push... until it stops hurting.

"Move, Junior!" I said. My hands, which moments before had been pink, were red. Especially the left. "I'm bleeding!" I said under my breath. I didn't yell; I wanted Manny to see me, but not as a weak, sorry girl. Not something to be pitied because I couldn't take pain like a boy.

after a while the Pit felt strange when they weren't there, as empty as the fish tank, dry of water and fish, but filled with rocks and fake coral like I saw in Big Henry's living room once.

The daddy was that color: he was short and looked like a big red muscle. He had chunks of skin and flesh crusted over to scabby sores from fight-ing. When he and China had sex, there was blood on their jaws, on her coat, and instead of loving, it looked like they were fighting.

"She don't need no help pushing."
And China doesn't. Her sides ripple. She snarls, her mouth a black line. Her eyes are red; the mucus runs pink. Everything about China tenses and there are a million marbles under her skin, and then she seems to be turning herself inside out. At her opening, I see a purplish red bulb. China is blooming.

Skeetah ignores Junior because he is focused on China like a man focuses on a woman when he feels that she is his, which China is.