* * *
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“Why did you go?” she had asked her brother once, and he had answered with a certain simplicity, “It was my turn.” And she remembered that dusty afternoon at the Fontaine-de-Vaucluse, how she had watched as a teenager crowned with a heap of dark curls ignored the DANGER signs and began walking down alone to the still pool of the Source. Old rockslides slid again under his shoes, for he was one of the ones who would make things happen. His voice would trigger avalanches, spring rainfall would pour his power and will, black birds would disappear into the sheer tall wall of him. His father begged him in a roaring gorgeous Romance language: come back, little idiot, my spit and image! The son did not listen. He walked down to the Source. It breathed its cool word to him: your turn. Come.
Winter still, and a once-in-a-lifetime moon, but she had to go outside to see it. Since that was out of the question, she watched the moon rise up slowly in the portal, shining down with its awful benevolence in the backyards of beloved strangers. Blood, and Super, and Blue, and always the first time in four hundred years, and looking, everyone rushed to say it, looking like a very thicc snack.
* * *
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She hoped the twenty-four online IQ tests she had taken were wrong. They had to be.
* * *
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When she was a child, the thing she feared most—besides pooping little eggs—was having the hiccups for fifty-five years, like the cursed man she had read about in her water-damaged Guinness Book. But when she came of age she realized that everything about life was having the hiccups for fifty-five years. Waking up, hic, standing in the steaming headspace of the shower, hic, hearing her own name called from the other room and feeling that faint electric volt of who I am, hic, hic, hic. No amount of sugar-eating or being scared would help.
* * *
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Everything tangled in the string of everything else. Now, when her cat vomited, she thought she heard the word praxis.
* * *
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Twice a month she and her husband had an argument about whether she would be able to seduce the dictator in order to bring him down. “I don’t know that he would even recognize you as a woman,” he said doubtfully, but she maintained that all she needed was a long blonde wig. At one point she actually screamed at him and lifted up her shirt. “You’re saying I’m not hot enough to change the course of human events? You’re telling me he wouldn’t go for THESE?”
* * *
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The future of intelligence must be about search, while the future of ignorance must be about the inability to evaluate information. But when she looked at the smoking landscape of fathers laid out by cable news, it seemed no longer a question of intelligence or ignorance, but one of infection. Someone, a long time ago, looked at the big gray wriggle of American fathers and saw them as what they were: just weak enough, the mass host that would carry the living message.
* * *
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The hurtling ascendance these fathers felt （hers actually rewatched election night coverage whenever he was under the weather, in his depressing den full of terrible screens） came at the expense of their daughters despising them, as they had always despised women as a general concept. How was it, she wondered, picturing her father’s hands spread wide, how was it that we were the broads.
* * *
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The more closely we could associate a diet with cavemen, the more we loved it. Cavemen were not famous for living a long time, but they were famous for being exactly what the fuck they were supposed to be, something we could no longer say about ourselves. A caveman knew what he was; the adjective was a sheltering stone curve over his head. A man alone under the sky had no idea.
* * *
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“Have you heard from lately?” her mother asked on the phone, and invoked the specter of a classmate who had escaped, who was nowhere to be found in any of the places where you typed in names. Her job was so legitimate that it seemed like a reproach: Aerospace Engineer. Had she, through her goodness and unswerving concentration, broken off into one of the better timelines? Every few years she typed in the name and called up only the same unresolving pictures of the girl she had known, posing next to a machine that had carried her somewhere other than into the future, her familiar flesh still partially made from those orders of cheese fries they used to share in high school.
* * *
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Modern womanhood was more about rubbing snail mucus on your face than she had thought it would be. But it had always been something, hadn’t it? Taking drops of arsenic. Winding bandages around the feet. Polishing your teeth with lead. It was so easy to believe you freely chose the paints, polishes, and waist-trainers of your own time, while looking back with tremendous pity to women of the past in their whalebones; that you took the longest strides your body was capable of, while women of the past limped forward on broken arches.