DiVida cannot catch her breath. She tries to hold it when walking, talking and making love. But it keeps running away. She decides she must be dead. Her first memory of corpse-ness, she was nine. That was the year the sky stung like a bumblebee and the wet ground hollered. It hollered like a wet baby. It hollered like a wet baby with a chaffed bottom, a bottom raw from having been left in a soaked diaper too long.

DiVida is in her room holding her breath so no one knows she is touching herself. Outside her room she hears her mother rain. She hears her father too. His hand booming. His voice crackling.

DiVida does not really remember this. She read it in a book. A book marked “Vanity.”

Sapphire has positive and negative jumper cables clipped to DiVida’s nipples. They cross her from left to right.

Sapphire says: Hold on baby. Let me put some towels under you. You’re going to have multiple orgasms this time and I don’t want your seism flooding the sheets.