My Body is a Cage and Other Stories

The next morning is bright and warm and her father makes eggs and bacon for breakfast.
They laugh about the sound they heard. In the daylight,their fear seems far away and silly.
When they check the deer cams, two of the three chocolatebars had been eaten. The
cameras take a picture anytime there’s movement, sothey see two raccoons eating one bar and a
deer chewing the other one. The third one remainsexactly as they set it. It begins to seem more
likely the shriek was, indeed, a fox. They’ll setit all up again before dusk.
With nothing better to do, they drive back to theEldorado outpost to get lunch. Irene
half-listens as her father talks about his new jobat a diner in the town he lives, forty-five minutes
away. He seems happy with it. She’s happy with it.She hopes he never touches his degree from
online-seminary school again. It was after he tiredof being a paramedic and signed up for classes
at a questionable online institution that things reallygot worse in their relationship. It put the nail
in the coffin of her religious disbelief. Then, asecond nail when her god-fearing, good Christian
father voted for a president with a blatant historyof sexual assault. Then, she really knew he
didn’t care about her. When she turned eighteen andwas still trying to have a relationship with
him, they somehow were debating about same-sex marriagein the car when she said, “If I ever
married, I wouldn’t want anyone there who wasn’t one-hundredpercent supportive of my
relationship.” He asked, “Do you think you’ll marrylike that?” and she said maybe. From then
on he had riddled her with Bible quotes and kept repeating,“love the sinner, hate the sin.”
The thing is that she was conceived out of wedlock.And she wondered if that was a sin
he hated too. If he asked God to forgive him for havingher.
The man across the table from her now wearing histattered fish hat, who seems so much
frailer than the father in her memories, doesn’t seemto be the same man. He has kinder eyes and