I remember the day with incredible clarity: it was a grey night, of course, and in it I followed the ravens all the way to the calf’s carcass. It was one of the pretty ones. I’d never liked cows, I was sick to death of cows — but I liked this one, fed her hay from the palm of my hand, and she put her sweet head on my lap under her mother’s watchful eye. Now, the ravens are pecking at her with a prolific and pointed sort of boredom.

It was strange on the farm. I figured this out when I was very young and very stupid, maybe five or six, in the matutinal time of my life. This was the time, of course, when I stared at American magazines under the covers and imagined myself as a supermodel: a woman with the perfect shape, teeth blanched as whale bone. I wanted to be pretty, but I was ugly and solemn as a beaten dog. My mother told me these qualities would make a wonderful wife of me, but secretly I knew she meant a wonderful husband. She already had Kathy — what did she need a girl like me for? Kathy was twenty and two years my senior and when she got upset, she would bite her palms so hard they would start to bleed. She slept with a knife under her pillow because she thought it would lend her some of its sharpness, and it did. Kathy was a total lost cause. My mother said Kathy would die in childbirth if God was feeling openhanded and free with his favours. Kathy was the only person I could talk to in straight lines.

What did the calf die of? She is unwounded. I saw her in the field just yesterday, snuffling around the grass, grandly, exquisitely alive with her sturdy legs, the soft curls of her fur.

When I think of Kathy, I think of how she slept, curled up on her side like a dead bug, mouth grim and straight as a cut filleted into her by that same knife. Sometimes, there was nothing when I thought back to the idle turns of childhood: just sterile sweepings of land, and green everywhere. The air is cold, prickly. I was only out to check the pressure gauge and I was only wearing my nightgown. I looked up and like a flash of brilliance: the raven overhead, more of its ilk swarming in the distance. I followed in my ratty blue slippers. The ground was hard. I cursed myself silently for not having prepared better; it is strange on the farm and I figured this out when I was very young and very stupid and things happen, all the time things happen that I cannot see.

One of the pretty ones, I said in my head, part of the speech I was already drafting for my mother. The pretty one, you remember her, right? The kind of pretty people breed with the utmost intent and we just got because God was feeling flashy with generosity.

Kathy’s wedding was awful. I felt uncharacteristically brazen that day so I ducked out midway through to swig wine behind the farmhouse, and this was where I met Declan. Declan was my age; he was the groom’s cousin. Declan was from the city. Declan was on break from university. Declan was studying poetry and Irish history and God knew what else. Declan was the worldliest boy I’d ever met. He was brown-haired, and very beautiful, and he’d been drinking; he looked like a reject cherub. Later, I learned it only took about three sips to set his complexion ruddy.

I asked him what his name was. He said his name was Declan. I’ve never seen you around, I said. He said, That’s because I’m not around.

We didn’t have a phone but the McConaugheys up the road had one and let me use it sometimes, so I told him the number and not to call until after eleven at night. I was so delighted with Declan, all the brilliant, city-slick lines of him, that I forgot about the wedding altogether until I went up to my room and found a knife on my pillow. I imagined Kathy in her wedding bed, biting her palms and then smearing her face with the blood. Kathy was a lunatic.

Days passed. Kathy and I didn’t talk. I waited for the call and when it came, I gaped into the receiver. How’s your mother, he asked. Good. How’s Kathy. Good. How are you? Good. I’m tired of you saying the word good. Did I ever tell you about Antaeus?

As it turned out, Antaeus was the son of Mother Earth — or the son of a monk — or some bastard back in the city who he’d had never liked the looks of, but the thing that never changed was that he drew all his hearty strength from the ground. If his bare feet could touch it, he was unkillable, until Hercules (the son of the Sky God — or the son of a king — or some other flash bastard) came along and picked him up and squeezed him as tight as his strong arms could bear. For days afterward, on my solitary wanderings, I was Antaeus burying his fingers to the second knuckle in the black black earth.

That’s how our irregular conversations went until one day Declan said, Come to school. Kathy had moved away with her new husband by this point, to where, we didn’t know. I tried to teach myself poetry but my mind was blunt and my words looped recursively off the page, and I knew without having to think about it that school would be a bust. I would smear dirt across the sheets and forget about it. I read Declan a few pages over the phone and his voice was very sad when he told me he didn’t know what I was doing.

I don’t know, either, I told him. But I can do things you can’t. I’m a witch. Don’t be silly, he said, and I remembered when he told me I was beautiful, how I’d shaken my head so hard it felt like my teeth were sliding around. I felt like something had been knocked properly loose alongside those teeth so I told him to close his eyes and imagined I could hear the amplified squelch as he did. Imagine a television. Imagine a suitcase full of your clothes and my clothes. Imagine a phone book. Imagine a city. Imagine– God, imagine people milling about and imagine, imagine the entire world, and he said, Stop it. Don’t talk like that. I said, Okay. Six months later, Declan had to come home because of a work contract he owed his father on the coast, and something happened to him there, maybe. I don’t know. They couldn’t find his body for a few days, and they weren’t sure what killed him when they did.

I carry the dead calf on my shoulders and pretend she’s the Pope. At home, my mother is doing her needlework. There she is! And there is Daily-cat and there is the moon hanging in the sky like a gaping, frigid maw. I dump the calf on the carpet. That winter, Kathy’s husband sends a postcard. There’s a photograph of her tacked to the back. Her eyes are bigger, her nose is smaller, her cheekbones are higher, her dense curls are now cornsilk. Kathleen says hi! her husband has written in his warman’s hand. The calf lows. She says, hello. She says, welcome home. Kathy with the knife under her pillow and the bite marks on her clean palms looks out of the photo and she’s all crooked.

I can’t be alone, I tell not-Kathy. I pace around like a locked up beast. I watch the moon. I read. I weep into the calf’s wilted fur. Sometimes, I pick up Kathy’s abandoned knife.