The Candle Labeled “To Brandon’s Girl”

You can only absorb it, and watch your child absorb it, and count the ways a seven-year-old is being taught, in a house full of relatives, that she is a guest in her own family.

And children hear it.

That is the thing adults forget, or choose to forget, because forgetting is more comfortable.

Adults believe that because a cruelty is subtle, a child will miss it, and the truth is the opposite: children are exquisite instruments for detecting exactly this kind of thing, because their whole survival once depended on reading whether the big people wanted them or not.

Holly did not have the words for what Gene was doing, but she had the whole of it, absorbed straight through the skin.