* * *
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She had once shared a stage with a man who stood and laughed in the voice of his great-grandfather for five full minutes, even to the point of falling backward and rolling on the floor as he cackled; he had explained earlier that his ancestors were always with him when he performed. When he finished, she smoothed the daisies on her dress and walked up to the microphone and said, blinking against the personal spotlight, “I cannot even tell you how much my ancestors are not up with me here right now.” But then, almost as a serious laugh, a strength entered her voice and she stood like a tree with a spirit in it, and she opened a portal where her mouth was and spoke better than she ever had before, and as she rushed like blood back and forth in the real artery she saw that ancestors weren’t just behind, they were the ones who were to come.
* * *
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The moon fell into her window and woke her. Every morning at four a.m., a prehistoric sense of duty, danger, and approaching wolves told her to get up and check the fire. She did, and the fire of the world still burned in its circle of stones, so she lay awake for an hour or two, trying to lull herself back to sleep. She imagined herself unfurling from a little brown seed and growing into a beanstalk, her mind rustling and thickening along every vine; that she was evolving into her present self from a single-celled organism amid humid well-designed ferns. Unfolding once more in a belly, with no thought of what life on the outside was like; the portal in another language, or before she had learned how to read.
* * *
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Strange, how the best things in the portal seemed to belong to everyone. There was no use in saying That’s mine to a teenager who had carefully cropped the face, name, and fingerprint out of your sentence—she loved it, the unitless free language inside her head had said it a hundred times, it was hers. Your slice of life cut its cord and multiplied among the people, first nowhere and little and then everywhere and large. No one and everyone. Can a be twins.
* * *
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The words that would send a sheet of flame up her body, when she thought of posting them a year from now:
what a time to be quote unquote alive
* * *
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look, here she is! her sister texted, and attached a picture of her twenty-week ultrasound, where a thumbprint could be seen pressing itself orange against the dark. look how big her head is lol
hello, little alien! she responded. welcome to this awful place!
Part Two
Despite everything, the world had not ended yet. What was the reflex that made it catch itself? What was the balance it regained?
You’ll be nostalgic for this too, if you make it.
* * *
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Everyone at gate B6 was bathed in gold. She sat there with one foot off the edge of the earth, close to falling, until she saw the couple with matching extravagant mullets that hung down past their shoulder blades. The man took out a brush and began to fight through his mullet until it was free, and then he handed the brush to his wife and she began to fight through hers with the same consecrated look; these mullets were their acre and when God came down he would not find a rock, a stump, a weed. They shook out their hair together as if it were the same head, joined hands, and rested. She sat in the gold that made them the same and felt a little less like dying.
* * *
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The cursor blinked where her mind was. She put one true word after another and put the words in the portal. All at once they were not true, not as true as she could have made them. Where was the fiction? Distance, arrangement, emphasis, proportion? Did they only become untrue when they entered someone else’s life and butted, trivial, up against its bigness?
* * *
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Perfect children played forever in the portal—impossible to believe they would not grow, surpass our height, end up a better monkey in that Evolution of Man drawing.
* * *
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A twenty-three-year-old influencer sat next to her on the couch and spoke of the feeling of being a public body; his skin seemed to have no pores whatsoever. “Did you read . . . ?” they said to each other again and again. “Did you read?” They kept raising their hands excitedly to high-five, for they had discovered something even better than being soulmates: that they were exactly, and happily, and hopelessly, the same amount of online.
* * *
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“I have a theory,” she said to the crowd, and then paused, for somewhere she thought she heard someone groan. She tried to resume, but couldn’t recall what she was going to say—something about being a woman in our time.