The hand first appeared when you returned home to practice the fourth song again, wrapping over your own hand clutching onto the neck of your viola, holding on iron tight until the strings slice through your built-up calluses, until blood coats the strings with your fingerprints.…

Mama tells a different version, when she’s had a cup or two of swamp-rice wine. We’re cursed, all right, she insists, but we’re cursed from the inside out. It was the first Dread Lord that put a hex on his own people, when he figured out he was going to lose.…

That was the first time he was certain he could taste knowledge. Of course they didn’t believe him at first, but then he started eating their knowledge. When he found a strand of his mother’s kinky afro he plopped it into his mouth without thinking. He found her fear and told her about it.…