The day after my whipping, I sat upon my bed, half dressed; Bono stood by the window.

“We cannot put you in a shirt,” he said. “You will ruin it.”

I stared down at my knees. Bono cast a shirt upon the floor.

He said, “The blood will ruin it.”

It was the rawness, the mess upon my back, its suppuration, more than simply the excruciation of the pain, which disturbed me; previous to this, all pain had been enveloped neatly within the confines of the human shell, as within a doctor’s bag the spiny instruments, the gouges and tongs, are strapped compactly, an arrangement of agonies. These wounds, however — these stripes bit into the world, and spillt.

At every motion, I could feel the incisions chafe and the crawling of pus.

I began to cry.

Bono picked up the shirt and put it in my hands. “You can slip it on,” he said. “You want, you can slip it on.”

I shook my head. I cried. I could feel my teeth showing.

“Don’t,” he said. “Crying ain’t something to do.”

“In the ice-house,” I sobbed, “in the ice-house, I defecated.” I could not stop from crying. I said, holding up my hands and weeping, “I had to.”

“That’s fine,” he said. He did not know what to do.

“It wasn’t weighed. Tell Mr. 03-01. It’s not accounted for.”

Bono came and he put his hand upon my cheek. He pressed my cheek so my skull was against his palm; and he said, “Prince, he don’t care today. There ain’t any measuring happening today. No samples.”

“What will happen to it?” I said.

He took the shirt from me and folded it over his arm. “Same thing as happens to the rest of us,” he said. “After a while, it just goes into the ground.”

My mother was found, later that day, down in the cellar of the main house. She had gone there alone. She had curled herself up tightly, her arms around her knees, and sat in the complete darkness, blood spangling the silk of her dress like the gloaming stars first bleeding into evening.