But then, Maxine's never allowed herself to want anything. She lives in the same place as Sarah Newlin, or Sookie before Bill: She's a good southern woman, a belle in her own mind, a person who couldn't even see her own rage or hatred until it was laid out before her on the table. I wonder if that made her more susceptible to Maryann, when she finally showed up. In any case, it's not that the black eyes are making her want Jason -- anybody's eyes can do that -- or making her want to play the most violent games possible on Bill's Wii. She always wanted those things, and was never given the opportunity to express them -- she couldn't even think them. They festered: Sarah's rhetorical acrobatics turned hate into love and genocide into patriotism.

Hoyt says it doesn't calm her down, just helps her focus -- "I'm gonna crack open your fucking skull, bitch!" -- and what she focuses on is destruction, hate, rage, bloodlust, regular lust. Which is why Maryann exists, and why she will always exist: If Maxine hadn't spent her entire genteel, trashy life being "calm," she wouldn't be fucking crazy now. But if she weren't fucking crazy now, she'd have spent her entire life without once being alive. Extremes call each other into being, because the world loves only balance.

"So she says God is coming?" Yes, specifically to Maryann's. Sookie asks Hoyt where that is, and Hoyt blushes, because it was once Sookie's house. "They're gonna rip that boy open and serve him up like barbecue!" Maxine cackles. Sookie asks about the clawed thing, suddenly, putting it together; Hoyt's heard that Miss Jeanette and Daphne both had clawmarks on their backs. Sookie and Bill share a look; Jason's more interested in the fact that Merlotte's has a new waitress to fuck, to his sister's amusement, and he's crestfallen to learn she already skipped the Jason-fucking part of the sequence and proceeded right to the dying: "She had her heart cut out, just like the other one."