I remember, my grandmother used to call me doll, in her Southern accent, standing over me in those sun-soaked mornings at her house, when the light filtered through the pink cotton curtains and painted everything in rose, and the house smelt like cinnamon and oranges. I was sent there, after The Event, as I called it, nineteen with lanky legs and a chest too broad for my liking. She cut my hair, calling it a country hick mullet, and would not let me in the kitchen.

I do not believe she hated me.

She loved me, and she loved God, and the Devil was inside her, telling her it was inside me, wearing my father's old clothes, two sizes too big on my skinny frame. She called my glasses too feminine, and would not let me wear them, on my mother's orders. I called her on the landline the day I arrived, and then never again. It wasn't a pleasant conversation. When the sun rose, and she placed a home-cooked breakfast, bacon, eggs and grits, hashbrowns and a cup of coffee, all delicious, because it was Nana's cooking, and she still loved me, she told me she had applied for a job on my behalf.

I arrived at the lumber mill with the sun smearing my already failing retinas into bright puddles of light. The paper bag in my hand held a corned beef sandwich and an apple, a can of soda jostling around inside as if setting me up for certain embarrassment later in the day. A large man exited the mill, arms bursting with muscle, and he waved me over with all the authority of a cop. I trudged over.

"You the new hire?"

I nodded. "Name's El-"

"Elliot Hanson, I know 'ya. You Gertie's boy?"

I swallowed. "Grandson." The word slid past my lips like sandpaper.

"Well, I'm not sure what she was thinking. You ain't hauling shit with noodle arms like yours," he grasped my bicep suddenly, laughing all the while. "I'm Hank."

"Hi, Hank."

Hank sighed, and waved me inside. "Alright, son. I'll put you on some easy work for now. You'll be with Robin," he led me to a desk with a girl stood at it, bundling lumber into piles for shipment, and left me there.

"Hey, new blood. What's your name?" She asked, her strawberry blonde hair specked with sawdust. Her hands were calloused as they deftly wound a zip-tie around another bundle. It struck me suddenly that she may have been the prettiest girl I had ever seen.

I looked down as I said it, already fiddling with the plastic tail of a zip-tie. "Ella."

Robin chuckled lightly, and in that moment, since the event, all the soul I thought had drained out of me flew back to me.

"Ella, huh?"

"No, I-" I started, quietly tripping over my words. "El. El is fine."

Robin's eyes lingered a beat too long, long enough that I could feel sweat forming beneath the cotton of my two-sized too big shirt. "El, then." She flicked her chin at the pile beside her. "Grab that end."

I did as I was told. The lumber was rough under my palms, seams of bark still clinging in places, and the two of us hefted the plank onto the stack together. It wasn't heavy, not really, but my noodle arms strained anyway. Hank's words, already lodged somewhere behind my ribs, and as I was soon to learn, there would be many more words to come, sticking to much more painful places.

"You're stronger than you look," Robin said, and I couldn't tell if she meant it or if she was just being kind.

"Yeah, well. Been carrying suitcases my whole life," I said, and she laughed again, that same easy sound, like it cost her nothing.

We fell into a rhythm. She'd hand me the zip-ties, I'd feed them through, cinch them tight, and she'd stack. The sawdust hung gold in the light slanting through the high windows, and somewhere behind us a saw screamed through wood, and Hank's voice barked something at somebody else. It was loud, and hot, and my shirt, even with the collar gaping at my throat like a too-loose noose, stuck to my back within the hour.

"So," Robin said, not looking at me, focused on the next bundle. "Gertie's your grandma."

"Yeah."

"She's somethin'." Robin said it carefully, the way you'd test ice on a pond. "She come to church with my mama sometimes, Mavis Kennedy? Prays real loud."

I didn't answer that. I picked at the zip-tie tail instead, the plastic biting a thin red line into my thumb.

"You don't gotta talk about it," Robin said, softer now, and I felt her glance flick over to me and away, quick, like she was giving me room to breathe. "I just...you looked kinda far off, when Hank was talking. Like you were somewhere else."

"I was thinking about the corned beef sandwich in my bag," I lied, and she snorted.

"Liar."

"Yeah," I admitted. "Liar."

The whistle blew for break not long after, a shriek that cut through the saw-noise and sent men filing toward the shade of the loading dock. Robin wiped her hands on her jeans and jerked her head toward the door. "C'mon. You can eat that sad little sandwich next to me instead of alone."

I followed her out into the white heat of noon. She would later be the first person to give The Event a name. She called it dismemberment.