Hogan uses the past tense and gives the impression that many years have passed between the first-person narrator Angel’s experience and her narration of it. The novel opens with Angel’s recollection that she can sometimes hear the voice of her great grandmother, Agnes. The entire prologue is narrated from Agnes’s first-person perspective. 

Agnes’s narrative tells the story of the winter day when her and Bush (the wife of Angel’s grandfather) were preparing a feast in honor of Angel, whom was a baby and had just left them.

There is an interlude in Agnes’s narrative to describe a dream in which Angela’s mother, Hannah Wing, enters as a frightening chimerical apparition that is neither animal nor human. Instead, she is someone who “stood at the bottomless passage to an underworld. She was wounded. She was dangerous. And there was no thawing of her heart” (13). 

Agnes recounts how it had been Bush’s aim to protect Angel from her mother’s violence and when Bush had to let Angel go, her grief was such that she cut long hair as a gesture of cutting off the memories. She also gave away many of her earthly goods.