I am a handful of rich black mud—a fool-woman, fool’s mud.

All on earth that I need to do is to lie still in the hot sun and feel the pig rolling and floundering and sloshing about. It were folly to waste my mud-nerves in wondering. Be quiet, fool-woman, let things be. Your soul is a fool’s-mud soul and is governed by the pig; your heart is a fool’s-mud heart and wants nothing beyond the pig; your life is a fool’s-mud life, and is the pig’s life.

Something within me shrieks now, but I do not know what it is, nor why it shrieks.
It groans and moans.
There is no satisfaction in being a fool—no satisfaction at all.