Music radiated from the main house of the Waterfall commune, bending sound waves, shaking tree branches, scaring animals, sparking acid flashbacks, stirring bad blood, and waking Sarah, who was sleeping in her cabin on the other side of the woods, a quarter of a mile away. Sarah pulled a pillow over her head, temples drumming beneath the grog and stink of dope and Jack Daniels. She knew Mom was blaring this shit. Nobody else at the commune was into Janis Joplin, not anymore. Too negative. Without a telephone this was Mom’s way of reaching out and touching her, person-to-person. No way, Sarah told herself, feeling half-alive and fully irritable, I’m not trudging up to the main house to listen to Mom in one of her dead feminist moods. She flipped the pillow over, tugging it tightly to her ears and creating an air vent in the linen so she didn’t smother. It occurred to her that mother was smother minus the s. “I swear to God,” she grumbled, as the music continued, “if I have to get up, everybody in the main house is going to die.”
