Miss Bates Dreaming, IV

I hold a book. It is much too small. A book for a doll or young child. We walk on the ruined part of the hill. So much wet thick earth and the strands of trampled vivid green grass coming through. Father is slipping, but mother is safe far ahead. Someone speaks. A voice! From all around me. It says, That is a book about the true nature of everything. This tiny book in my hands with words too tiny to read? In it is written that Satan is us. That knowledge comes from the book itself, as if the letters crawl from the page and through my skin, into my blood. I shove the book into the earth. Father laughs, says, Hetty, Satan cannot be all around you and inside you and not also be you