I don't even remember that first telling.
-- Narrator (Part I: Chapter 1)

Importance: After Cee watches her brother Wayne drown at the beach, she returns home to tell her father what happened. Over the course of the following hours, she is forced to repeat the story innumerable times. However, the more she tells the story, the less she can remember about her original telling, and thus about what she actually experienced. This moment conveys the ways in which the individual might create fiction out of experience in order to lend her trauma a neat narrative form.

Sometime was rearranging in my mind and all of a sudden, what I knew had happened to my brother came undone.
-- Narrator (Part I: Chapter 2)

Importance: Not long after Wayne drowns, a policewoman visits the Williams's house and questions Cee. At first, Cee recounts her version of events the way she recounted it to her parents. Although she believes this story, as soon as the...