A mother sits surreptitiously outside her daughter's pillow fort and listens to her daughter tell a story. This, like other nights, like all of her other stories, revolves around much bloodshed and a male hero. The daughter is bright and precocious — reassurances told to the mother by doctors, teachers, and psychologists. Her stories of violence and the hunt for flesh verify her budding imagination, intelligence, and creativity. The mother listens to these stories regularly, each one a new iteration of the last. The mother also recounts her own real-life story; she thinks of the husband who left them and took the dogs, but still provides money. He was a man of the woods, and would butcher his kills with their little daughter gurgling and starry-eyed. The mother and father had a terrible relationship, spiteful, malicious, and in the past united by their upbringing in bitter poverty. Now, he makes an abundance of money— wealth he generates for his family— though he has no interest in helping to raise his daughter. The mother weaves her story together with the daughter’s story. She becomes more and more intoxicated as her daughter rambles on. She grapples with her drinking, with raising her child, and with her aloneness, but she continues to try for her daughter.