From The Book of X by Sarah Rose Etter
“I was born a knot like my mother and her mother before her. Picture three women with their torsos twisted like thick pieces of rope with a single hitch in the center.
“The doctors had the same reaction each birth: They lifted our slick warped bodies into the air and stared, horrified.
“All three of us wailed, strange new animals, our lineage gnarled, aching, hardened…”
◊ ◊ ◊
“Each day, my father and brother pull meat from the quarry to sell in town like my father’s father and his father before him. Their bodies disappear over the green grass of The Acres, their figures swallowed by the thin mouth of the long horizon.
“I have never seen the Meat Quarry, so I must invent it over and over again in my mind: Giant red walls of flesh marbled with the electric white of fat…
◊ ◊ ◊
“I have to tell you something,” he says.
“He slides his left hand into view. A band of gold glints on the ring finger, and a tear rips through the universe. The planets quit their motion. The seas pause. The clouds hesitate, frozen in the sky. The sun, for a brief moment, does not burn.”
◊ ◊ ◊
The Book of X is published by Two Dollar Radio, “a family-run outfit founded in 2005 with the mission to reaffirm the cultural and artistic spirit of the publishing industry. We aim to do this by presenting bold works of literary merit, each book, individually and collectively, providing a sonic progression that we believe to be too loud to ignore.”
◊ ◊ ◊
For more, visit