She would pick herself up very soon now, and sneak home by the back streets, keeping to the shadows in case someone came looking for her, find Momma, admit she had been wrong—
(!! NO !!)
The steel in her—and there was a great deal of her—suddenly rose up and cried the word out strongly. The closet? The endless, wandering prayers? The tracts and the cross and only the mechanical bird in the Black Forest cuckoo clock to mark off the rest of the hours and days and year and decades of her life?
[…]
She rolled over on her back, eyes staring wildly at the stars from her painted face. She was forgetting
(!! THE POWER !!)
It was time to teach them a lesson. Time to show them a thing or two. She giggled hysterically. It was one of Momma’s pet phrases.