Summary

Mailhot addresses the final chapter to her mother. She tells her that she is going to change the way she speaks to her because being explicit has never worked and "some knowledge can only be a song or a symbol" (126). She asks her mother about death and answers her own question by defining death as "not the absence of something, but a new thing" (126). Terese sees life as "a running thing without roots for me" (127). She asks her mother if she can now know her inheritance. She asks "is the fall of man your story?" (127).

She asks her mother about Salvador, the prisoner, and about her own mother's body. She asks: "Do you know you left us hungry" and "what of my body and the women who've left?" (129). She asks herself if she forgives her mother and her father, who are formless to...