IJ study archive

Joelle's walk and U.H.I.D. (Disability and Deformity)

quote

For a while, after the acid, after first Orin left and then Jim came and made her sit through that filmed apology-scene and then vanished and then came back but only to—only four years seven months six days past—to leave, for a while, after taking the veil, for a while she liked to get really high and clean. Joelle did.

Context

"After the acid… after taking the veil": the veil dated like a religious vocation and slotted into the sequence of abandonments — Orin, then Jim, then the veil, then the Material. What the acid actually did to (or near) her face stays exactly as untold here as everywhere else; the syntax's stalling repetitions ("for a while," three times) are the closest thing to a flinch the narration allows her.

In anthology