They scream at dawn. The children who are small and quiet wait to be murdered. They stand at the entrance to her room and are uneasy. They shake back and forth and begin to vomit and urinate on the floor. She sees blood in their urine and the children that are the youngest are whimpering.
The uncut are like clay and they stand behind the house in rows. It is like they chant but they do not move. She rises and wades across the marble floor. She looks at her sight in the mirror. She can see through her skin. The outsides are violent and uncouthed. The wakefulness nest. We are diseased and soiled, she thinks and she will not see her skin.
The uncut look like they are piles of clay. Some crude hand has given them shoulders and square block torsos. The same hand rolls balls of earth into eyes. The eyes do not look. In the afternoons, the screams will exhaust. The back forth cuts of machetes will stall.
Her eyes look hollowed and it is as though the eyes are ghosts. The saints are elders and are unclothed and despaired by an always weakened foe. The saints look like rugs draped on skeleton lamps. The saints stand close to the uncut and it is difficult to tell them apart. The screams should have lessened by now.
It is our house, she thinks and the children have wrapped themselves into the shapes of small jungle animals and sunk into the marble cracks in the main hall. The uncut no-eyed claymen will still burn the house into the earth. They are rocks. They are plaster men. They are glued and torn into the plantations of the colonial idols. And these are severed coasts: they are only here because they are mad and we are cut.
The elder saints weep at midday. The molded foe, uncut and barren, still lifes: it is not the evil that will counter god.
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