From my Faulkner Pastiche assignment from Southern Lit Class. :
“I was at the psychiatrists,” she would say. “He says that you are causing me mental duress.” Or sometimes she had been to a judge to see about putting Patty in an orphanage, sometimes she had been to the pastor who had called Patty a Jezebel, sometimes she had been to the doctor who had informed her she was dying due to too much negative energy (she often threw in phrases like “mental duress,” “negative energy,” or “personal restoration” which she had remembered from episodes of Oprah), but Patty could look out the large glass window at the back of the house and see her mother circling the property. It was obvious Eunice had gone nowhere, for she very rarely left the house. Only when Oleander needed hospital care did she leave, living off of groceries brought by her mother and checks sent by the girls father –now a professor of mythology in Montgomery who long ago was a potter who built brick kilns in his back yard; he had pulled Eunice out of rurality, showed her music and art, taught her how to use a pottery wheel and talked to her about theories of universal salvation and danced with her under full moons on the sand of the Gulf. He pulled Eunice so far out of her world that when he let go of her, a toddler in her arm and a child in her womb, she snapped back like a rubber band, more isolated and conservative than she’d ever been. Years of imaginary doctors and lawmen had told Eunice Nix the evils of her daughter, and Patty had accepted the one way commerce of bullshit until her epiphany on the road to home from church.
“Ollie,” Patty said, “I’ve just had a brilliant idea.”
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