And then there are the deals you don't even know you're making. Bartlett takes the garbage out, in his wheelchair, down a ramp outside a broken-down, ramshackle, sad little house. His broken, fucked up, worthless life. It's a lot easier to hate a pedophile than to feel bad for one, but that doesn't mean you can't do both. I mean, he's useless. There is nothing to his sad life. He is the difference between compulsion and following through, and he deserves what he's about to get, but it's still sad. He was a kid once. Probably a kid that got fucked with in his time. And now he's old and gross and lives in a wheelchair and inches his old painful way up that ramp and inch at a time and nobody likes him because he's a fuckwad. He sees Bill standing at the top of the ramp and his hands leave the wheels of their own accord: he rolls back. Into Bill's arms. "I'm not here for money," Bill says. "I'm here for Sookie." I mean to say that he reclines back against Bill, like a girl in a bathtub, like a girl on her uncle's knee, and Bill bites him. And all that care and worry and sadness and history flows out, into the sacrifice. All magic is substitution magic.

Tara bitches about the mosquitos, but Lettie Mae is telling truths she doesn't even know: "You want to meet the devil, you wait at the crossroad. For Miss Jeanette, you gotta go past where the devil's at." The only way out is through. "You're getting as bad off as Lafayette and his juju," Tara says -- and it's interesting that the Haunted Kernbread made an appearance in the Previouslies this week, don't you find? -- which Lettie Mae takes, as they always fucking do, the opportunity to "pity" her sister for "having to raise a sexual deviant," bless her heart. "That runs in families, you know. Like demons." Oy with the demons already. But she's not wrong: Jason and Sookie are the two halves of a very sad, very long history. Pain runs in families too.