Chapter 13
Section 1 (DIRT): The narrator, calling herself the Devil’s Wife, describes meeting a co‑worker she calls “the Devil.” He treats women contemptuously, is sarcastic and rude, and initially she resists him while chewing gum and feeling insolent. He eventually asks her out; in his car he lights two cigarettes, bites her breast, uses foul language and rapes her, telling her “We’re the same.” She becomes obsessed, and they drive to the woods where she buries a doll. Their sexual relationship intensifies, they stop going to work, and they spend time wandering playgrounds, fairgrounds and rain‑soaked coloured lights. She feels watched (“He tailed”) and describes his features metaphorically: “Tongue of stone, two black slates for eyes, thumped wound of a mouth.”
Section 2 (MEDUSA): She imagines herself flying on chains over the burial site, recalling that she carried a spade, was covered in mud, but cannot pinpoint when or how. She notes that nobody liked her hair or speech. The Devil squeezes her heart dry. She gives the camera a “Medusa stare,” hears a judge’s summing‑up, feels indifferent, and is locked in a double‑locked cell with the key discarded. She writes secret codes to him daily, hoping for release after twelve to fifteen years, but resigns to a life of dying inside. She howls in her cell and asks rhetorically whether hell can exist if the Devil is gone.
Section 3 (BIBLE): She repeatedly denies involvement in alleged crimes, insisting “No, not me… I didn’t… I couldn’t… I wouldn’t.” She claims no memory, was not present, and demands a Bible, a lawyer, a vicar, a priest, a TV crew, a journalist, a shrink, and a Member of Parliament. She repeats phrases such as “Not fair, not right, not true,” and “Maybe this, maybe that, not sure,” while insisting she cannot remember and that it might have been him.
Section 4 (NIGHT): She delivers a bleak monologue describing a fifty‑year night in which the walls whisper “Suffer. Monster. Burn in Hell.” She vows that when morning comes she will finally speak, ending with “Amen.”
Section 5 (APPEAL): She lists a litany of possible executions—stoning, hanging, being shaved and strapped to a chair, injection, peroxide head, being chopped, tongue torn out, throat cut, bullet, hammer, knife—and muses on the meaning of “life means life.” She questions what she has done to everyone, including herself, when she was the Devil’s wife.