Gretel lives in a sparsely wooded space behind the nearest service station,
her childhood home in the trailer park, an abandoned forest in a fairytale
some half-kept secret in Mississippi where she grows like a beansprout or a
cottonmouth — alone in some interminable summer where her younger brother
once sweat it out — Gretel watches as her arms and legs lengthen and buckle
like nightstand sunflowers nodding off and bent at the neck, and although
she knows that she will die at this same site, this one remaining lot in the middle
of nowhere, still she sweeps and mops and washes and wrings out old rags
and scrapes off toothpaste from the very same sink where her younger brother
once spit out two of his teeth