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Show Moon -147 creatures were moving and crackling the leaves. Then I saw what they were and I smiled: squirrels and sparrows, my harmless friends of the forest. In dreams, you relive the past, but you also get-what a wonderous gift-to invent it over again. I finally escape the smoky subway and call Josh as soon as I get back to the hotel. He's duly appreciative of my little adventure, then says, "Windfall kicked out a rail in her fence. I can't control her." I want to say, "Everything is out of control!" I can't tell him that my period is overdue. He might think it means a child at last and then be disappointed. He's been good about not pressuring me to have a child since those early years, but he wants one; I can tell by the way he talks about the children he meets in the homes where he works. I imagine myself chanting aloud to him the moon-madness reasons why I haven't borne his child: There's a dark garden that wants me in its walls. In this garden I walk, my skin mottled and streaked in the brocade patterns of sunlight. I'm hugely pregnant, carrying the sorrows of everyone I know, for I have somehow been made for this. I want to make it come out good, to bear, as they say on the rosary, fruit. But no child will be born, no labor can release me. Beast of burden, surrogate mother, I've taken it on, all of it- Esther's ruined life, the longing eyes of my brothers, Dad's perpetual gloom, my mother's loveless life-and offer myself up to the shreds of sunlight, never to be delivered. If he loves me as I hope he does, Josh would cry, "You are you, not them!" Not them! My name is I. The seeing I, imperfectly trained to lead the blind. Eye of the storm, eye of the needle, the center, the difficult place to pass through to the Kingdom of God. Aye, aye. Yes, Yes, I say yes. Omygod it feels like Jesus. The ocean is |
