Chapter 1
Tonight, the death of fourteen year old Hiêu Phạm will occur as she begins the transformation into the helldog Agamemnon. Her human body will be where she kept watch of the hens near the coop, her glasses broken and knees scraped, her eyes glassy and organs failing one by one after the heart and brain, the three points where blood vessels and nerves cross on the back and sides of her neck severed sweetly by the snap of the jaws of the grand old Grey Buzzard.
The chickenhawks will pass over the small Camp Dennison farm, watching the ground below from the divinity of the gray wash of sky, spinning through the clouds that sit on top of the atmosphere like oils in a broth. They will see the highway, they will see the deciduous brush, they will see the green mess of trees just beyond the white lines of fences, but they will not see Hiêu Phạm.
Her mother will come out of the skewed A-frame Sears house with the blue roof and the wooden siding with the black streaks of mud, stepping onto the gravel path and into the fragrantly damp dirt, looking for her, but she will not see Hiêu Phạm.
Her Vietnamese father in his big rig catching a dastardly case of white line fever as he operates the wheeled mechanical body with the heavy breathing sides while driving out to South Dakota from Ohio, will call home from outside of a truck stop when the twilight glow is dimming and the black strokes of the transmission towers seem to keep the sunlight from grazing on the crops along the daylight cattle drive. Nobody will pick up the phone. He will not see Hiêu Phạm.
Nobody will see her again. Her flesh is underground, shallowly buried.
She is not with the human realm anymore. She is the helldog Agamemnon.