Sweet Water
“Thou shalt not steal.
That woman was a blackbird, hair black, eyes black. She took what she wanted with long, grasping talons; she made herself at home in other nests. In the night she was invisible: the ruffling of her feathers was the wind across the water; her eyes, glinting in the moonlight, might have been reflections of my own.
Thou shalt not commit adultery.
For years I smiled and pretended, hid what I felt, put up with what I put up with because I didn’t know that I deserved better. I didn’t know that I could ask.
Honor thy father and thy mother.
When I was seventeen I went to college to escape my father’s impotent rage and my mother’s infinite capacity for forgiveness. When I left that white-columned house on its wide Chattanooga street I thought I was leaving it for good. But instead of escaping my past I merely circled back to it: I went out and married a man as thwarted and confused as my father, and I became everything about my mother I used to loathe.
Thou shalt not kill.
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