Larissa Smith’s Reviews > Salvage the Bones > Status Update

I always thought it was something a man did for a woman when they married: build her
something to live in.

Her eyelids droop, and suddenly she looks tired. Her breasts are all swollen, and the puppies pull at them. She is a weary goddess.
She is a mother so many times over.

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.