* * *
■ ■ ■
Far away now, her sister texted, I think she’s hearing rain for the very first time. The first flake of the snow of everything, now wild and warm. Thursday in the rain; October in the rain; twist of a heavy red apple; word on the tip of the tongue; grain by green glass grain; and all of it until it ran out.
* * *
■ ■ ■
An eye primed for reading will also read an image—caucasianblink.gif!—so her eye read the images her sister sent of the baby, left to right, first toe in the bath, Russian novels that no one would ever write, sprawling epics that covered every inch of the human experience, zoom in, zoom in, zoom in. The beautiful eyes, yes, were getting bigger.
* * *
■ ■ ■
A proposed operation to stitch the baby’s eyelids closed, and they suffered because so much of her communication was when her eyes widened, they believed with wonder. But on the morning of the procedure the anesthesiologist shone a light into the dolphin-blue depths, listened to the dragging tides of her breathing, and said he wouldn’t, if it were his daughter he just wouldn’t do it.
* * *
■ ■ ■
They dreamed, they all dreamed about her. In their dreams she crawled, ate grapes, sang nursery rhymes. In their dreams her overgrowth syndrome shot her past other people and made her powerful, and she moved among them with the use of ingenious wheels, extenders, whizbang devices. She held up her own head, she slept like other people. Above all she spoke to them, in a high-pitched otherworldly voice.
“I am a very advanced life-form,” she announced one night, “but soon I must return . . . to the Planet 9/11.”
* * *
■ ■ ■
The time ripened inside gold watches. Pyramids of pumpkins and tubs of rusty orange flowers began to appear outside of grocery stores, and October issued its invitation for spirits to return to earth. In the hospital, back when they thought the baby would never leave it, her sister and her husband had gathered a pile of seasonal outfits for the baby to wear: a year in a day, winter summer spring fall.
* * *
■ ■ ■
“Can I keep you?” a woman asked her son, as she changed his diaper on a public bench. The question was monogrammed for him alone, was soft as a blanket already with use. “Can I keep you? Just for a little while?”
* * *
■ ■ ■
When it came out that we had only twelve real years left, there was a kind of urgent flowering, people everywhere felt it. Families began planning their summer trips to the Postcards, to every mountain, field, and forest on the fast-spinning rack. And novelists, in the portal, began to rise on a tide of peculiar energy. This was their moment. They were going to say goodbye to all that! They were going to say the final goodbye to all that!
* * *
■ ■ ■
Meanwhile, on the earth of the baby, the climate grew hotter: icebergs melted, the seas rose, permafrost cracked to release prehistory, sections of the Great Barrier Reef blinked out whitely and one by one. Despite all this, on the earth of the baby, the thing that was people talked, touched, painted pictures, kept going.
* * *
■ ■ ■
think if the ocean has a fever for years . . . lol
no sickness and broken bones
we’d be flying through the warmth more than walking
* * *
■ ■ ■
When she was fourteen weeks old they took the baby to Disney World because this, in America, was something that you did. She moved among the unknown characters serenely, she abided the fireworks, she passed through the doorways that looked like doorways and into the houses that looked like houses, only pausing to express absolute ecstasy when the band 98 Degrees began to play on the main stage at Epcot and the baby heard, she heard, her father began to dance with her, her eyes went as wide as a documentary called Planet Earth, cameras diving into the blue, from outer space into the deepest reefs, she fucking loves 98 Degrees, her mother exclaimed, this was the music of their youth, when the heart was a red hope, they knew every single word, the band was named for the temperature of the human body, the baby danced, she was dancing in her father’s arms.
* * *
■ ■ ■
The baby rode with equanimity through the darkness of the Haunted Mansion, regarding the proceedings with the same tolerant amusement she had shown at her baptism. Don’t worry, she seemed to reassure her mother and father, who balanced her like a child queen between them in their roller-coaster car: it won’t be like this, it won’t be anything like this at all. These are the forms, she told them earnestly, as the camera above took a picture of them in their “corruptible mortal state,” for everyone to laugh at together when the ride was over. But if you ever really need it, I will put on a white lace dress and come to you.