viiic’s Reviews > On Sundays She Picked Flowers > Status Update

[SPOILER] “She missed Candle. Thirteen, almost fourteen, years she’d lived in that farmhouse, loving its dereliction, adoring the noise and restlessness of its ghosts. The haints were harmless once they were used to her, and Candle, once tamed, was as doting to her as a dog. How would it treat her […] now that she had abused and abandoned it, left it to fester as she grieved? Could a house forgive?” Let’s hope so

[SPOILER] “You blaming the child for something she ain’t have no part in, Vivian!” […]
“What’s the difference? […] She killed Nessie, over and over and over. Since birth, since conception—I hate her, Philly. […] I know she ain’t the one who deserves my hatred, but I can’t…” Her voice cracked; she sobbed. “Where am I supposed to put it, Philly? The anger? The love? Where’s it s’posed to go?” Yeah, I get it

[SPOILER] “Take her off the pedestal, Vivian. Just this once, […] think about her and how she was. Think of how she beat that girl for anything […] you can’t tell me that’s right.”
[…] “We had it worse. That girl, she don’t know nothing about it, not even the first clue—we had it worse and we didn’t—we wouldn't think to do something like that […]
“Maybe that’s on us then,” said Phyllis.” Yup.

[SPOILER] “I won’t have her stay here,” said Vivian […]
“It is her mother’s house, Vivian. No matter what she did […]”
"God, you actin’ like she told a lie or skipped town. She killed our sister, Phyllis! […]
“Maybe she…” And the words froze in Phyllis’s throat […]
“Maybe she what, Phyllis?”
[…] “Maybe she deserved it.” That’s maybe going a bit far, but Judith did defend herself in the only way she was taught

[SPOILER] “The television flicked on and off at its leisure, stretches of silence and near sleep broken by earsplitting screams and lascivious moans. Their father’s voice boomed from other rooms […] Ernestine’s clothes began their march. […]
the television roared, […] a single name repeated—Judith, Judith, Judith.” I would’ve left the house the first time that fucking TV starting acting up

[SPOILER] “Vivian saw that the TV was on the fritz again, the signal roaming from Phyllis's preferred wholesome programming to scenes out of horror movies, near-naked women splashed with blood scrambling from chain saws, a little girl rotating her head like an owl, spewing pea soup. Vivian […] checked that the TV was unplugged (it was)” Well that’s not worrying at all

[SPOILER] “Judith brought her rocks and stickers, any little thing to appeal to her coldest aunt, and despite the innocence in the girl’s face, the open desperation, all Vivian saw was Daddy slipping his ring off Momma’s cold hand and putting it onto Nessie’s warm one.” Holy fuck

[SPOILER] “it was Daddy who took the baby, a girl, and named her Judith.
Vivian couldn’t love her niece—her sister. How could she, knowing what she knew, seeing how Ernestine had labored to bring the cursed child into the world? Phyllis might have thought there was no such thing as bad seed, but Judith was conceived in evil, born in evil.” I understand why they hated Jude, now (though it was never her fault)

[SPOILER] “somewhere between the shifting of furniture […] and planting gardenias, Daddy planted another seed in Ernestine.
[…] Vivian couldn’t miss the sounds, the squeaking […] the knowledge that she was most likely sleeping peacefully in the room she shared with Phyllis while her father was smothering Nessie, forcing another damned baby on her, haunted Vivian through the years.” Holy fucking hell

[SPOILER] “Just a little longer now,” she’d said. The thing—she hadn’t wanted to call it a baby, didn’t want it to settle in her brain as a brother or a nephew or whatever—was blue, hadn’t even drawn a single breath.” Oh is that why Ernestine hated her child? Because she was born after her father raped her? Again?