Three little girls sleep in a house. They're alone. It's a strange house, long like a shoebox and only one room wide, tin-roofed, set on cinder blocks, removed from the street by a long steep rise. The house has no toys, no television, so the girls have spent the night playing dress-up—they've all gone to sleep wearing comically large women's nightgowns. Katina is 7. She lies in her mama's bed. Her 9-year-old sister, Latanya, curls on the living room couch with their friend, Lucretia.* It's a dim, grimy room, littered with beer cans and lit by a single red bulb propped in the front window.

Where are their parents? The fathers—vanished. The mothers come and go at weird hours. Often they're gone all night, sometimes for days at a time. When they go, Lucretia babysits Katina and Latanya, though Lucretia herself is just a child. She's two weeks from her eleventh birthday. She's large for her age, and vaguely sad, a special-ed kid who understands others only when they stand in front of her and speak loudly and slowly. An odd drowsiness envelops her. She often sleeps from nine in the evening until three the next afternoon.

A man enters. Gently, he lifts Latanya off the couch, takes her to the bedroom, sets her down next to her younger sister, then returns to the living room.

He's not gentle with Lucretia. He puts both hands around her neck, wrenches her into the air, hurls her against the thin wall separating the living room from the bedroom. A noise flutters out of her. Katina and Latanya come half awake. They listen from their mother's bed less than a foot away. They're scared but too young to understand. Even if they did, there'd be no call to 911. The house has no phone...