The perpetrator was a cart, a wooden one with wheels that collected dung and had been hammered nearly octagonal, as if the wheel had never been invented at all. ¹

We had little, but other families we knew had no more, so we didn’t know how little we had. ²

We children watched the wheels roll out and flatten the dung like gingerbread. We watched with a particular thrill when one overtook a rat, casting a shadow on its back. In an instant, blood burst through the pelt, and the body stamped its red seal for a few meters before it was breaded over with straw and dust and more dung—that plentiful sediment of living things.

I’ll say it: We rooted for the cart.

We were girls, ³ and twins. ⁴ We were at that age when it had become important for an auntie to slap us if our skirts flew up while we played or if we accepted a sweet from a strange man.

Let’s call my sister Ulla, and me Uma: limber Scandinavian names to provoke your empathy. ⁵ Ulla and I had switched places that morning. We did it often, but today it had been my idea. I liked the forbidden chill of stepping into Ulla, all loose limbs and smart mouth.

As Ulla, I stuck my hands deep in my pockets, elbows out. I swung them, taking up space. Ulla always had more air around her.

When she was being me, she kept her eyes down, mouth in a knot. It was how I looked, she swore, and maybe it was: I didn’t recognize our bangs or fat lips when I caught a glimpse in the undertow of a shiny counter. I imagined myself looking distinguished, with a beard and white hair, and–somehow–glasses. It was disappointing to be reminded you were only a girl, and a silly-looking one with a plastic necklace.⁶

Mama was walking beside me, carrying a plastic bag stamped with the name of some American company. I tried to make sense of the letters: tall, leaning sticks and a few small curls. We were headed for the market. ⁷

“Ulls,” Mama groused, and swatted me when I knocked against her.

“Sorry, Mama.”

Ulla’s eyes found mine, pleased. She had been speeding up our heartbeats, riling me up. She would hold her breath, puffing out her chest until the veins in her temples popped and my own pulse throbbed. She liked action: the horns and shouts and rattling motors. I sucked in a giant breath and let it out slowly, the way I did to sign my name on the bus window.

Everyone was out, even if they had no particular business—and no one did, really. You went down to the market to bump into your friends or pick a fight. Ulla and I always made it a point to find the girls from the other side of the highway and remind them that they were whores. According to them, we were so ugly we gave it away for free. After a few exchanges, we’d be happily throwing rocks, raising wine-colored splotches on each other’s skin. ⁸

We had to pass the bus stop to reach the market, something I dreaded as myself. The bus stop was always crammed with sweating men drinking moonshine out of plastic bottles, hunched over stuffed tote bags. Miserable, squinting toddlers who might have belonged to anyone squalled in the dust.

Bold now, as Ulla, I stared back at a man who was looking at us like a pair of goats he wanted to buy. I let my eyes roam from the snapped-off vegetables at his feet all the way up to his face, burned over and over by the sun.

His friend smacked his lips, and the men beside them laughed.

Nobody was shocked. A granny tsked, and no one cursed her, but they didn’t shut up either.

The staring man turned to the lip smacker. “Did you see those pieces? I’d like to—” And he made a gesture I had never seen before, as if his fingers were a scoop reaching up from below. Inside of us, maybe, or just under our skirts.

Ulla turned, eyebrows lifted. Stunned for once, or perhaps just reacting like me.

It was so hot that the crowd fused and morphed into a single blob. ⁹ The porridge I had eaten that morning sloshed heavy in my stomach, but my head was foggy. ¹⁰

A pace back, Mama’s hand tightened on my wrist. I was on the clock. We had to scorn him, right here in the street, before the granny tsked again and Mama decked us both. We had to get really angry. To curse all the female ancestors who’d brought these men into the world to be a stain on girls everywhere, or people would think Mama hadn’t raised us right.

The cart had just started to crawl into the right lane when Ulla stopped and yelled, “Take your filthy hand and use it on your filthy mother, and leave decent girls alone.” She brought her own fingers together at the tips and waved them like a torch.

A few of the grannies nodded and sucked in air.

The man laughed and pawed his friend, who swatted him as if he’d reached for the last half-cigarette.¹¹ Mama’s grip on my arm let up, even though I hadn’t done anything good.

We were nearly across the highway, and Ulla had almost caught up to us when the truck that had been sputtering behind the cart revved and knocked it forward.

I was there, but I still can’t say how the cube of air around Ulla suddenly filled with the cart. Or how the hay on it flew off, and the yellow bricks scattered all over the highway. All I knew was that beneath all of it Ulla wasn’t a girl anymore, just one of the skins hung at the butcher’s.

There were pins in my fingers and toes, as if I’d been sitting for too long. I shuffled my feet, trying to kick the current back over to Ulla.

“Uma,” Mama shrieked, the a dying in her throat.

I ran to her side, but she was bent over Ulla.

The granny yanked at Mama, trying to pull her up, but Mama already had Ulla bundled against her. ¹²

“She’s gone, sister,” said our neighbor, who had three living children of her own. She tried to pry Mama’s fingers off the pieces of Ulla, but they snapped back into place.

I sneaked a foot out of my sandal and rubbed it in the dust. There were little bumps on the sole that wanted to be torn open.

“You saw how she didn’t let those pigs say nothing to her,” Mama insisted, over Ulla’s broken shoulder.

“She’s gone now, sister,” the neighbor repeated, gently. “A better place.”

I left my foot planted in the street, understanding now: Ulla was dead. Snuffed. Never again would she speed up our hearts until they burned our throats like a hot bean.

“Too good to live,” Mama sobbed. “My sweet, shy girl.”

Where was the man, all this time? Where had he gone to escape the scene? From Mama’s cries and the lady who was pulling her up onto the curb, telling her to stop crying, that Ulla was just a girl? ¹³

I spotted the man a lane over, helping the cart driver pick up the hay. They were both sweating, wet blobs spreading across their backs. Traffic crawled around them, avoiding the golden spill.

I stood in the cart’s shadows and watched the man, his pants sinking as he stooped to reveal his shiny, marbled crack.

Whatever of Ulla was trapped in me curled over my back, hot with poison. I kicked off the other shoe. The itch in my feet was torture now, seven layers under the skin.

I picked up a stick lying in the road and it snapped to life, too, part of me now. I ran up behind the man, feet burning, and thrust the stick into the flesh of his sad, soft ass.

He yelped and whipped around. Already I could see that he wasn’t the same man. The whites of his eyes had turned pink, his face to pale dough under the scorch.

“You want to look, whore?” I shouted in Ulla’s voice, waving the stick. I didn’t even know if men could be whores, but the word was delicious to say. Delicious to imagine him pawing a thousand sweating, dirty men and begging them to take it easy on his silky crack.

But he didn’t. He turned back to the hay, shreds of bark stuck to his backside. He didn’t want his friend to laugh now. He didn’t want anyone to turn and paw him. He hadn’t any money, most likely, to pay for the funeral. Pay off the police.

The cart driver glanced at me, then at the man, and shrugged.

“Sack of plague,” I screamed at the man’s back, bolder now. I stepped onto the hood of a parked car you could’ve broken into with a good knife. “May no one touch you if you live to be a hundred.”

I rolled my eyes up to the heavens, like Mama did when she swore at the neighbors. I didn’t know where it came from, but a deep, sulfurous growl tore out of me and commanded, “Kill yourself.”

Killing yourself was a sin: He’d never get to heaven. Never get to that pool-blue sky you saw in paintings, where everyone was clean and dry. ¹⁴

He turned all the way around, as if I’d told him to undress right there in the street.

“Kill yourself,” I repeated, quieter now, so it was just between him and me.

I snapped the stick into two raw halves and hurled the green at him with all the current left in me. One of the halves flew into his face, but I didn’t stay to gloat. I hopped down into a cloud of dust, leaving him with the hex.

Mama borrowed enough to scratch our surname on a flat stone and put Ulla in a modest box. There was only enough for a first initial—the U, the one we shared. ¹⁵

It was only natural for Ulla to change, after all that. She grew quieter until she turned into me.

I saved up sparks. I stored insults from the bridge girls, every leering face of every unzipped man on the bus. If you’d put a bulb in my hand I could have lit it up. And when I’d had enough for both of us, I exploded.

Not every day, not every week. When I needed to. The rest of the time, I kept quiet. Even when Mama rolled her eyes at the sky and said, “Watch over my Uma who was too good for this world.”

I liked it, actually. I liked the idea of being too noble for the crowded, miserable world. I imagined myself marching through America, and Paris, the Eiffel Tower snapping in two for me like a rich man’s gate.

I was sure Mama guessed. When I only shrugged over some insult instead of cursing and kicking. When I slipped and called myself we. When I said my own name in my sleep.

I would catch her sneaking looks at me as we washed in the basin or poked the fire, sure she saw some freckle or scar. Some mark that had only ever belonged to me.

One night, she turned to me and grabbed my chin. “Ulla,” she said, looking me down the eyes.

A branch dropped off the stack and started smoking. I choked, throat turning to sawdust.

“Promise,” she demanded, shaking the cough out of me. “Promise me you’ll never cross that highway.”

“Yes, ma’am,” l croaked, even though we both knew the whole world was on the other side.