In the following essay, DeMouy examines Miranda's inner conflict in "The Grave."

In "The Grave," all the ghosts of the Old Order are gathered up and Miranda begins to understand what ancestry will require of her. In a paradigm of the separation from the bosom of her family that she will eventually achieve, this story focuses on the removal of several caskets from the family graveyard, which are then laid to rest "for eternity" in a public cemetery. After the coffins have been disinterred from the farm's graveyard, Miranda and her brother Paul play in the empty trenches and find treasure in the pungent soil, a legacy from their dead ancestors. Later, Paul shoots a rabbit, and together they discover tiny fetuses in the dead rabbit's womb.

Once again the mysteries of birth and death revolve around the matrix of sex; the conjunction of these creates an...