Alison McGhee

You’re thinking about pigs.

You grew up with pigs.

You raised them, if “raise” is the right word for what you did, which was toss them buckets of slops every night and watch them root about in the dirt and grass and then in the broken-down barn, where they broke it down more with those astonishing snouts of theirs.

Pigs are what you’re thinking about right now.

You’re remembering them as babies, piglets in the back of a dirty white truck.

Hauled one after the other over the tailgate, knives flicking off marbles as the squeals rise high.

A sow lying on her side, mauled by miniature snouts smelling milk.

As a child’s bank, with painted curly eyelashes and a slot in a high pink back.

Galumphing across a field to a bucket of mash and tight whistled call of Soooo-eeeee, which actually is the way those who raise pigs call their pigs home.

As going to market or staying home.

As eating and enjoying egg shells, coffee grounds, and corncobs.

As having roast beef.

As taking half an hour to mate, as your young daughters pointed out once at the Oliver Kelley Farm.

As going whee whee whee whee all the way home.

As heat-seeking mamas lying on a sun-soaked country road, stopping the schoolbus.

As Spamtown raw material, slaughtered daily in numbers five times higher than the highest number guessed by a tableful of friends the other night.

As thinskinned purses with gold clasps.

In labor, huge and groaning, at the Miracle of Birth Barn at the State Fair, while humans gather around to point and stare.

As the small, anxious friend of Pooh.

As having none.

Why is this extremely tall hairless man grinning so happily as he holds his orange bowl? Perhaps because he loves the color orange, and orange is not that easy to find in a ceramic bowl, and yet here he is, having found the perfect orange ceramic bowl.  Merriment!

Or, maybe the tall hairless man is grinning at a funny text message on his cell phone. Perhaps he grins because he just got new glasses, and until today he had no idea just how beautiful and sharp-edged the world is. Or maybe he just did his laundry, mixing whites with coloreds, and he loves the new grayness of his formerly white t-shirt.

Maybe he’s happy because he has no hair, and he relishes the thought of all the money he’s saving on shampoo, conditioner, and “product.”

In truth, he was placed here on this page because the orange bowl is a stand-in for orange juice, and orange juice – not the tall hairless man in his grayish t-shirt – is the subject of this post. Yet the writer of the post, in her search for orange juice images on the internet from which to download a free, no-copyright-permission-necessary orange juice image, was mildly dissatisfied with all the images she found.

Too sterile, most of them. Perfect orange juice being poured into crystal wineglasses, or perfect orange juice displayed on a tray containing a perfect breakfast, about to be presented to someone wearing a perfect nightgown, sitting up perfectly in a perfect bed.

Also, no pulp. This is a subject on which the writer of this post can wax eloquent, or at least obnoxious. Why is it that so few citizens of her country enjoy orange juice with pulp in it? Why do most cartons of fresh-squeezed, not-from-concentrate orange juice have that NO PULP sign proudly emblazoned across the top?

In her grocery store, NO PULP or PULP FREE takes up the most room, followed by SOME PULP, and lagging far, far behind is the little nearly-hidden row of MOST PULP.

What are you afraid of, people? Despite the fact that even in her own home she is the only pulp drinker, she still buys MOST PULP. You don’t want pulp, strain it. Pulp is what gives orange juice its tastiness, its texture, its tangibility. (Is tangibility a word? Suddenly it doesn’t look right. If it’s not a word, it should be, so it’s staying in.)

She grew up drinking orange juice rarely. Theirs was a frugal household and it was expensive. When she drank it, it was stirred together from a can of frozen concentrate mixed with three, or was it four, cans of cold water.

In her late teens she tasted fresh-squeezed orange juice, and the orange juice of her past immediately and permanently receded down a dusty lane labeled “made from concentrate.”

Later, in her mid-twenties, at a terrible time in her life, she spent some time in Miami at a friend’s apartment.  He went to work in the morning and she sat on his balcony eating bowls of cereal and closing her eyes and tilting her face up to the sun.

She also played John Fogerty loud, extremely loud, so loud that to this day she still can’t believe no one called the cops to make her turn it down. When Centerfield came on she danced around the apartment, which her friend had divided in two with a tall navy blue curtained partition. She used the partition as an unreflecting mirror and danced in front of it.

From the balcony she could see across the street to a shack from which a family sold fruit. It was hot – it was Miami – and the sun beat down on the tin roof of the shack. One day, craving fruit, she went down to the shack. Bananas turning brown, melons going soft, papayas and mangoes and starfruit, which she loved and had not seen since she lived in Taiwan.

And orange juice. Orange juice from a juicer, surrounded by piles of oranges and squeezed into a big jar with a piece of tinfoil laid haphazardly across the opening. Juice that flies buzzed around, and bees. Juice that was not refrigerated and never had been. Juice that she could hear almost all her friends whispering in her ear not to buy, do not buy that, my God the germs, look at those flies.

She bought it and took it back across the street, high up into the apartment, out onto the balcony. So what if it was germy? Didn’t people need germs? That would make them strong, fighting off the germs.

She drank it down. All that pulp. Faintly warm from the sun. The best juice she’d ever had.

Some memories are defining. Did she know back then that it would be that juice, from that shack, that juicer, those flies buzzing around, that she thinks of, to this day, when she thinks “orange juice”?

Now she drinks her non-cold orange juice from the glass she lets sit all morning on the counter and thinks about that family, looking at her in bemusement as every day she bought the juice, the going-bad fruit. John Fogerty blasting so loudly he drowned out her thoughts, which was what she wanted. That balcony and the sun. The dark blue curtain that she couldn’t see herself in.

She buys one a week, usually on Wednesday, which, even though it’s her least favorite day, somehow seems to contain more lottery juju than Saturday.

She lets the machine do the picking. She used to have a complicated system of birthdays, ages, personal lucky number and multiples thereof, but then she decided to throw caution to the winds and let the machine, in its infinite wisdom, decide what was best for her.

These days it’s Powerball, because if you’re going to dream, you might as well dream big, right?

Back in the day, when she and Oatie and the roaches shared their fourth-floor walkup in Boston, she bought Megabucks. Once a week she and Oatie would walk down the block to Joby Liquor, where Oatie would buy a six-pack of cheap beer and she would buy her lottery ticket.

Nowadays she buys her Powerball at Winner Gas, at 44th and Nicollet. Winner is a lucky store with a lucky name, and besides, she loves Winner Gas. Everyone who works behind the counter is nice, and the store is a cross-section and meeting place for all manner of human beings, which is one of the great pleasures of urban life. Or should be.

Once bought, the ticket goes straight into its special powerball compartment in her fat black wallet. She doesn’t look at the numbers, because why should she? She has given over her lottery fate to the machine.

Now commences the dreaming, but only after she has plotted out how to get her sweetheart to share the many millions that are about to come their way. She’s done her research. The back of the ticket must be signed before the millions can be collected, in the form of that enormous check that will be presented to them on television (the thought of which she hates, but she’ll do it anyway because, after all, it’s a small price to pay).

So she will have to persuade him to sign the back of the ticket too. Despite the fact that he is ardently against powerball on principle’s sake, and despite the fact that he scoffs at her Wednesday purchase, she feels sure that she can get him to sign his name by dangling before him the thought of all the cool things they will then be able to do for all the people they love.

That will get him.  And if it doesn’t, she’ll tell him that she won’t collect the cash without him. She will rip this ticket into tiny little shreds unless you sign your name on the back. To show how serious she is, she will even begin to rip it a tiny bit if he won’t sign.

If he still, still refuses to share the cash, will she take the money anyway? This is a moral dilemma over which she has pondered more than she wants to admit. The answer is probably, but then she will buy him all sorts of  things which he will not be able to resist, such as  a flat in Paris, a small herd of goats, and a lifetime supply of chili dogs.

Now that that problem is solved, she can begin to dream. What first?

The financially prudent thing to do would probably be to put it all into an account right away and spend the interest only, but surely winning the powerball means a little fun is in order. How pathetic that would be, to win the powerball and just be all grim about it.

First they will take care of their families. How do you take care of your family best, though? Do you pay off everyone’s mortgage for them? What if some are doing fine financially and others are struggling – do you still give everyone the same amount? For those with children, do you give them the money in the form of college funds for their children? Any parent would surely welcome a college fund for their child, right?

Great care must be taken to insure (ensure? she always struggles over the “i” vs. “e.” But maybe she’s tempted to put “e” because she’s thinking of Ensure, that milkshakey type beverage that gives you all your daily vitamins and a bunch of calories, a beverage that she herself has partaken of in the past and which is much tastier than you’d think, given all the vitamins and minerals) that everyone happily accepts the cash and doesn’t get thorny about it.

So maybe the college fund idea is best. But then what about family members who don’t have children? What’s the best way to give them their cash? Maybe just set up a trust fund of some kind, however those things work.

She’s sure that there exist many certified financial planners out there who would be happy to advise her on how to set up college funds and trust funds in return for a reasonable hourly rate.

So, good. Family members, all set.

Now on to friends. This gets a little dicey, because they have many beloved friends, and she wants to just throw big wads of cash at them and sing a happy song about how “Here is some money for you! Do with it what you wish!” But where do you draw the line? Lots of friends + lots of cash = greatly diminished powerball winnings before the bank account sees its first deposit.

She doesn’t like thinking about where to draw the line, so she quits thinking about it.

Back to the fun. Which always includes an apartment – small, nothing big – in an old building near Columbus Circle. They’d be near the Park, on virtually all the subway lines, easy access to Chelsea and the Whitney and the rivers.

And a houseboat, which ever since she was a little girl and read that book about the girl who lived on a houseboat she has wanted. A small houseboat. It wouldn’t even have to run very well, because really all they want to do is live on it, hooked up by a rope to a dock somewhere. Or a tree, even.

And can they also buy a canned Airstream ham? Have you ever seen one of them? All her life she’s loved trailers, and an Airstream is a kind of trailer, only it’s the best – so beautiful and shiny – and the canned ham is the tiniest one of all. Everything in a canned ham fits perfectly, and that’s how she likes it.

What would be the most fun of all? Setting up a private foundation – surely that reasonable-hourly-fee financial person would know how to do that too – and then giving away tons of money. To whoever they want! (whomever? yes, she thinks that it’s whomever, but will leave up the whoever so as not to be grammar-police-ish.)

Little micro-grants to artists in need, but only artists who really are in need. Of money, not ideas and talent, because ideas and talent should be a given in an artist.

First, last and security on apartments for homeless people.

Quarters placed in gum machines everywhere, to make small children happy.

Micro-loans to penniless people with great ideas as to how to help other people.

Paying for the groceries of the person with the nice smile ahead of them in line at the grocery store.

See how fun it is? This is her favorite part of the powerball dream. This is where the virtually-free entertainment aspect of the weekly powerball ticket comes in. Way better than most movies, for example, and only 1/8 of the cost of a movie ticket, let alone the bucket o’ popcorn (free refill, and believe her, she’s taken advantage of that more than once) and large Hawaiian Fruit Juicy Punch.

If there’s money left over, and it wouldn’t have to be much, maybe she could indulge herself in a few clothes. Some vintage cowboy shirts to add to her collection? How about that tunic coat that she can see so clearly in her mind but that doesn’t seem to exist in real life, not that she would know because she and shopping don’t mix well.

And, to go out on a limb, what about some handmade shoes for the both of them? He is a shoe fanatic and her feet are tough to fit, tough tough tough, and she always thinks about the olden days, when the cobbler came around and made a last that fit your foot exactly, so that the damaged nerves in the right one would be cushioned, somehow. It’s impossible to find that in a store-bought shoe, but a handmade one, surely it would be possible. Italian leather, maybe.

Everything is possible, with powerball. Even if for only an hour or so, on a Wednesday, at Winner Gas on 44th and Nicollet.

Shoelaces

They tend to disappear and then re-
appear, incarnated by the children into
whips or nooses,
hand- or ankle cuffs.
Clumping laceless around her house she sees the
evidence everywhere: wide-eyed dolls
beaten into surrender, a satin horse
dangling from a doorknob
by its slender neck.

Gentler lives
emerge sometimes –
a ribbon for a stuffed cat,
a ponytail holder for a curly-haired girl.
Rawhide threaded with
colored beads becomes a necklace.

Still, in dark moments it’s the
arsenal that she returns to.
Stop this, she tells them, as the
whip flails and the noose seeks a victim.
No, they say, it’s too much fun.
Their laughter, another sort of weapon,
hangs in the air.

Every happy chore makes her happy in the same way – satisfying to perform, tangible results, a smoothing-out-of-life feel when she’s done – but every unhappy chore is unhappy in its own way. Vacuuming is one of her favorites, and so is wiping down the kitchen, and so is laundry.

Ironing? Dusting? Get thee behind her, Satan. If it cannot be put through the washer and dryer without undue harm, it is to be avoided. If it’s small and intricate and grouped with other small and intricate items on glass-fronted shelves, just say no.

Laundry is always a happy chore. Load after load: whites, lights, darks. She is a laundry racist, say her children, who believe in shades of gray and whom she does not allow to touch her clothes, not that that stops them.

Towels are folded first because a minute or two later, there’s a giant stack, and who doesn’t like to feel accomplished with so little effort, at least once in a while?

Then come the jeans, followed by the shirts, followed by the t-shirts, followed by the underwear and, finally, the socks, which are painful and frustrating for reasons all laundry-folders know and therefore best not discussed here.

Recently she went home, to the land where she grew up. There she found the house she grew up in, and the man and the woman who were there when she was born. The fields and woods stretching in all directions, and the pine trees and the white birch and the maple, and the remains of her old tree house.

She went to the diner with her father, and sat with the men who have known her all her life, the ones who heave themselves out of the booth to hug her, and then squish over to make room for her. She ordered the special – hash and toast and two eggs and coffee – and watched as the waitress brought out the special jar of strawberry jam kept in the diner fridge just for her father and his friends.

She was told by one of the men that if you stretch strings across your outhouse hole you can play tunes, that is, if you’re male. She is not male but she is intrigued nonetheless and would like to get to the bottom of this, so to speak.

She came home to sit in the thirty-eight-year-old New Room with her mother, who was still in her bathrobe and had made fresh coffee. Together they watched her mother’s computer, photos from forty and more years ago floating slowly across the screen.

Oh, there you are. So cute. Oh, there’s Oatie, her first birthday, so cute. Oh, there’s Robert John in that little winter coat. Oh, there’s the Christmas where you got the giant stuffed camel, remember? Oh, there we all are at Gettysburg – remember? Oh there you are holding Oatie’s hand on the first day of school, remember?

She remembered.

Late that night, after midnight, she came downstairs to find her mother sitting at the computer playing solitaire. The rumble of the washer and the dryer emanated from the other room.

“It’s late,” she said. “Aren’t you tired?”

“I’ll be going up soon,” her mother said. “I’m just doing your laundry.”

“I am capable of doing it myself, you know.”

Click, a red six on a black seven. Her mother is good at computer solitaire. And regular solitaire. And Scrabble. Click, a black nine on a red ten. Her mother smiled.

“I know you can, honey,” said her mother. “But how often do I ever get to do your laundry, anymore?”

She looked at her mother and listened to the whirring of the washing machine, winding down now. She remembered the years of the clothes hamper in the only bathroom of the house, holding the clothes of its six inhabitants. She pictured her mother, a non laundry-racist like her grandchildren, swapping out the newly dry clothes for the newly washed.

She kissed her mother goodnight and went up to bed. In the morning there was her laundry, clean, fragrant, folded.

She was walking her dog near the Stone Arch bridge, high above the Mississippi. The day was a day of dreams, sun and wind and sky and every flowering tree mad with blossom and scent. Far below the water of the mighty river raged and foamed and spun itself over falls.

Her dog was tired and because of his tiredness, well-mannered. They had some extra time and she was tired, too, and so they slowed from their characteristic near-trot to an uncharacteristic amble. Coming toward them on the same path, next to some tall oaks lit by sun, was an old man.

She admired him the way she often admires old gentlemen, the gentlemen who always wear hats, and suit coats, and leather shoes. They remind her of her grandfather, the one she knew, who stooped over the wash basin with Lava soap, and the phantom one she barely remembers, the one who played the violin and emigrated from Russia, or was it Poland, when he was four years old, to escape the pogroms.

The old man brightened when he saw her and smiled at her.

“Isn’t it wonderful, to be a dog?” he said, gesturing at her black, four-legged companion.

“It is,” she said.

“To be free,” he said.

“To be nothing but yourself,” she said.

They stood smiling at each other. He was much shorter than her, and she tried to place his accent. Eastern European, she decided. He reached his hand down to the dog, who sniffed him and wagged his tail and then lay down in the shade.

“I am an old, old man,” he said. “I am more than twice your age, young lady.”

“You don’t look it,” she said.

He took off his hat. Wisps of silver hair shone in the sun. “Now you can tell,” he said. “Now you can tell what an old, old man I am.”

She shook her head. They kept smiling at each other. He noticed the pendant, her talisman, hanging on its chain around her neck, and asked her what the Chinese characters meant. She told him. He pulled a battered copy of “Japanese in Three Weeks” out of his pocket.

“I was so young when I was a soldier,” he said. “And I almost died the third time the Russians captured me, and I escaped through China, and were it not for the kindness of those people I would have died.”

“Where are you from?” she said.

He traced a map of his history on one of the oak trees. From Poland through the war, and on to Asia and the Himalayas and, after a long time, here. To this city built on either side of the mighty river that bubbles up out of the ground in northern Minnesota and threads and spreads its way south to the Gulf of Mexico.

He told her of his life. He was a child in that war, a child who was a soldier, a child who killed, by his own count, many soldiers on the other side and felt, what? He is not sure, other than that he doesn’t blame them, really, for capturing him.

“It is strange how quickly war strips everything away,” he said.

She sits now at her desk late at night and pictures him in his dark coat, his hat in his hands, that beautiful smile that he kept smiling as he looked at her, there where they stood by the river. He wept at one point, and she put her hand on his shoulder. He kept talking about the war, so very long ago, and the soldiers he had killed, and how he felt, what? nothing? not much? so long ago.

The Mississippi spun and danced far below them.The black dog lay quietly at their feet.

“On that last prison train, the one where most everyone else died, I managed to hoist myself up one day,” he said, “up to where there was a window above us, and I looked down. And I saw a river, far below. And on the river, a boat. And in the boat, a boy and a girl. And I could tell that he loved her, and that she delighted in his attention. And every once in a while, one would reach an oar out, to keep the boat straight. And the sun was shining.

“And I was fourteen,” he said. “And I thought: the river. The river. How beautiful.”

Now he was an old man. She watched him as he stood next to her and spoke to her, a familiar stranger, of matters of the heart. His heart. His life. His youth. All those soldiers. The bright and beautiful river, then and now. Had she been alive seventy years ago, and known him.

When she took her leave he bent over her hand and kissed it.

A day without sun, a day of gray rain and gray wind, a day when you suddenly do the mad calculation of spring-to-fall days and think, “My God, if the sun comes out right at this very moment and shines down continually until the cold returns, you will have only slightly more than one hundred days of warmth.”

The mad calculator in your misfiring head fixates on arithmetic like this, the kind that comes click click click on a night – most nights – when you wake slightly after 3 a.m. and think, “My God, if you fall asleep right at this very moment you will have only slightly more than one hundred minutes of sleep left.”

And then you will yourself to fall asleep, right now, right at this very moment, and you flip the pillow to the cool side, and you flip yourself to your other side, and you stick one foot out from under the blankets in an effort to change things up in a tiny way so that your brain will shut down and you will be asleep, right now, right at this, very, moment.

But no. No sleep forthcomes. And no sun either.

You heave yourself into the grocery store. What is it you need? The brain fogs like the sky outside. Butter.  “Most Pulp” orange juice even though you are the only most-pulper in the house.  Red potatoes. Apples. A bag of frozen okra because you have a mighty craving for okra and why the hell shouldn’t you fulfill it, this one small craving you can fulfill, given that your craving for sun and warmth will never be fulfilled because the sun will never shine again.

But what is that? What is that, over there on your left as you make your bleary way down the row of apples?

Why, it is an art gallery. Right here in the grocery store, a painting, a sculpture, a mosaic painstakingly assembled from colors you would have chosen if your name were God and you were creating the earth and it was only Day Three and you weren’t yet in need of rest.

Who is the artist? Is he the man in the green apron spraying down the lettuce? The woman making the pyramid of grapefruit?

You stand and look upon the display, the colors curving and swirling, rising and falling like the tides that are so far from this grocery store on the plains.  These peppers didn’t have to be arranged like this. They could have been lumped in piles, each variety to its own, segregation by color.

The artist stood here with carts full of unpacked produce and had a vision. The artist, name unknown, looked upon dozens of cool, satiny peppers and thought, “If you begin right now, right at this very moment, with these materials at hand, you can make something that will last as long as it takes these one hundred peppers to be plucked, one by one, from these shelves. Something lovely. Something beautiful. Something that won’t last.”

And he began.

Once there was a baby boy. He was an intense and passionate baby. Before he was born, a couple of weeks before his official due date, his mother sensed that he wasn’t yet ready to be born. She could feel that he needed a little more time, just a bit more, so that all his nerves would knit together and he would be ready for the outside world, with its unpredictable loud noises and its occasional bright lights and the sensation of air all about.

But the baby was born anyway, despite his mother’s sense that just a little more time would have been a good thing. He took a long time entering the world – three days – and by the time he made it they, they being others who were not his mother, felt that extra caution was necessary in case he was sick after his long and difficult journey.

So in went the tubes and on went monitors and there he lay in a bright room with a paper cup taped to the top of his head. His mother held him in her arms in a rocking chair and fed him, and a few days later home he went, minus the tubes and the paper cup.

Soft lights. Quiet. Tight swaddling in a baby blanket. Constant touch. These were things that he seemed to crave.

Many years later his mother thinks of the word “swaddle” and can feel her hands moving invisibly: smooth out the square of flannel, fold down one corner, lay the baby diagonally down, up with the bottom corner and then across – tight – with one side and then across – tight – with the other. Presto, swaddle-o.

The baby wanted to be held all the time. If not held all the time he screamed and shook and made himself sick. So his mother held him all the time. She had a contraption she called the “Red Thing” that she strapped on when she got up, and into the Red Thing he went, so that he faced out. His thin legs dangled down. His thin arms dangled out. His head lolled until his neck muscles were strong enough to hold it up.

From dawn till late at night, the baby boy’s back lay against his mother’s chest and he faced out. She cooked with the baby dangling before the flames – dangerous! but she was careful – and she vacuumed with the baby swinging with the rhythm of the long vacuum pole, and she never sat down with the baby in the Red Thing because if she sat, he screamed.

They stayed in motion. Much of the time, the mother ended up pushing an empty stroller down the sidewalk because the baby screamed if he wasn’t in the Red Thing. When the weather turned cold, the mother buttoned her long winter overcoat all the way up and put a stocking cap on the baby, so that oncomers smiled at the mother and then shifted their eyes downward and smiled at the baby boy. It was a two-for-one smile.

When the mother did sit down, she took the baby boy out of the Red Thing and sat him on her lap with a stack of books beside them. They had two nursery songbooks that they were particularly fond of, and they – they meaning the mother – would sing their way through each page. This was long before the baby boy grew old enough to realize that he did not like the way his mother sang, and long before he had sisters, who backed him up on his “please don’t sing, at least out loud”-ness.

They read their picture books together, baby boy on lap, mother propping each book up while he reached out and turned the pages.

Where the Wild Things Are.

Mike Mulligan and the Steam Shovel.

Good Night, Moon.

Lon Popo.

Outside Over There.

Ferdinand.

Ferdinand was the boy’s favorite, the story about the little Spanish bull who didn’t want to fight, the little bull who wanted to sit just quietly under the cork tree and smell the flowers.

How many hours did the mother and the boy spend together, sitting on the couch, reading picture books? Many. Many many. Many years’ worth of many. It was their favorite thing.

When the baby turned into a boy, he went to sleep every night listening to stories on tape. He and his mother went to the library and checked out the stories on tape, and sometimes they bought them, and the boy knew the stories so well and loved them so well that once he was in bed he reached out and blindly pressed “Play,” not caring that he wasn’t anywhere near the beginning.

Once, on a long car trip, the boy woke from sleep to look at his mother and say, “Is this where we are?”

Years went by. The boy grew and grew. He grew until he was very tall and very thin, so tall that he towered over his tall mother. More years went by, and the boy turned eighteen.

One day, the boy sent his mother a text message: “Would you kill me if I got a tattoo?”

The mother would have been happy if the boy never got a tattoo, because she had been there at the moment when he was born. She could still see his newborn skin, so soft and paper-thin that touching it was like touching air. She could still remember crying in fury and sorrow the first time a mosquito bit that skin. That first scar.

But the boy was eighteen now, and 6’4,” and his body was his own. His body had always been his own, his mother reminded herself. She wanted to wrap her arms around that body and keep it safe, but. . .

But.

What sort of tattoo would he get, his mother wondered, and where would he put it? She thought of the needles drilling down through the layers of his skin, the ink pushing below the surface, and how much it would hurt. She tried to think of other things. It was hard.

“Not as long as it’s a heart on your bicep with an arrow and the word ‘mom’ in the middle,” the mother texted back.

The boy did his research and saved his paycheck, and the day came when off he went, to St. Sabrina’s Parlor in Purgatory. He got his tattoo. There it is up there. It is not a heart on his biceps with an arrow and the word “mom” in the middle.

But it could have been.

First Haircut

She wants to grow it long, and
she wants to go to the barber.
She wants curls floating down her back, and
she wants the barber’s hands on her
skull, tilting her head now this way, now that.
She wants it both ways.
She wants her locks for herself and
she wants to be
shorn, dark petals drifting down.

It’s not possible to do both, I tell her.

She looks into the mirror, picturing herself as
she might look if
she keeps it, imagining what
she might lose if
she doesn’t.
In the end, she can’t resist her own longing.
The hands of the other win out.
Studying herself in the mirror she sees someone new,
a familiar stranger.
The girl she was, gone.

Her first memory is of a dark, slow journey. Many years went by before she realized that what she was remembering was birth, her own, into this world.

The memory came to her first as sensation. Often, in the borderland of sleep and waking, she would feel herself traveling through a tunnel. Slow and soft, as if she were lying on her stomach in a rowboat rowed by someone else. Liquid metal occasionally felt its way around her head.

Everything was warm and dark and quiet. In the darkness she could see light at the end; she was traveling toward light. She had no words but she was fully sentient. She was fully aware of what was happening, and what was happening was that she was beginning a new life, in this world.

The feeling was one of inevitability, and the calm acceptance that goes along with it.

Here we go.

She was in her twenties before she understood that she was reliving memory, and not a fluke sensation of the blurred edge of sleep. The soft metal? Forceps. The light? Light. The calm acceptance? Because she had chosen it, chosen to come here.

In her middle age she wonders what came before. She wonders if she decided, before that journey into this world, what she hoped to learn in this life. She wonders if she chose the people she would meet, and the sorrows she would face, and how she would grow through them. She remembers knowing she would emerge into light. She remembers the feeling of Here we go now. Whatever comes. She draws strength from that feeling, that one in particular. Here we go now. Whatever comes.