=To You, My Child Unborn=

Those first two marriages, boy, let me tell you, that was a cold country to be traveling. The bed a pitiless tundra you could see no end of. Shadows of wolves on the wall. I could never sleep more than winks for weeks at a time. No difference between day and nightmare. Many were the times I had to eat my own foot, whichever foot still remained, simply to survive. I exaggerate you not. Eventually I escaped the madman in the castle, but I was still bound and blindfolded. I needed to run into a wise hermit, a magic fish, a talking tree—something like that. The fairytales all told me so. Nothing doing. It was all a package deal of lies. What a doofus I felt like believing in such tripe as that. Kick in the pants it was but I deserved it. So I disguised myself as a boy and joined the circus as a juggler. Naturally I lied about my experience. Are you with me so far? No? Well keep on stumbling and bumbling after me a while longer in the dark; the light will come, it done for me, sorta. Meanwhile, I was fired from the circus. I could juggle well enough, I found, but only with one ball, and what good was that? Well, plenty, as it turned out. I fell in love with that ball and soon I was pregnant, although not in the usual way; mind you, nothing was ever in the usual way. I would never give birth, not to a baby, anyway. Just as well, except who do you suppose I’m talking to now? I’m talking to you, my little bird of prey. You fly over forests and fields and whatnot. You see what I can’t see and tell me all about it, but in a language I don’t understand, as if that should be any big surprise. This is where things get less complicated. I am my own magic, you see, but it wasn’t the way they described it in the books and songs, which is what made it so hard to recognize. The thing itself, without the amplification of metaphor, it’s so ordinary, like a salt-shaker, except not like that, because it shakes no salt. Get it? No? Pretend you do, just for a few sentences more. Go on. Do it. Amuse me. Hooded, you bob your head, following the shadow of my finger, just as instinct demands you do. Yes, you do get it, after all.