To experience the world as it truly is-
[james burke]

Three hours ago, I was standing in the bathtub, wondering if my water had really broken. Now, the midwife is at my feet, I am out of my mind, and God is apparently out to lunch. 

You can push whenever you're ready, the midwife tells me. This reminds me of the people who lean over the deathbeds of their loved ones and say It's okay! You can go now! We release you! 

Before she has finished speaking, I transform into an entirely different creature, one with only a gut to bear down and a throat to roar. It is the closest I hope I will ever come to demon possession. 

To push a living thing with bones out of your body is to surrender to the absurdity of creation. Why this way? Just out of curiosity? I bellow some version of this question to the room at large, but in labor everyone assumes anything you ask above a certain decibel is rhetorical. 

Why this way? Why do stars consume themselves? Why is light a particle and a wave, and also neither of those things? I picture some dark colossus offering a cheery shrug. Why not?

Push! says the midwife. Push! says my doula. Push! says my husband. My body says nothing. She simply wrings me like an old towel.

I push.

A cattle prod presses against the very center of me. The baby's shoulder is stuck, wedged firm like a pebble in the tread of a tire. My flesh tears. Oh, it tears. Don't push don't push don't push says the midwife, and she throws one of my legs backwards, then the other. 

I tear again, and again, cursing the long-gone male anesthesiologist who told me, three hours ago, that delivery was "imminent" and there wasn't time for an epidural.

Now, PUSH, says the midwife. A howl rises from my throat, summoning my atoms back from the indifferent universe for this one task. The sun has set, here on the brink of the solstice. It's almost midnight. Subatomic particles thrum. A star is eating itself, right this moment, unimaginable lifetimes away. Somewhere, the sea breaks itself, striking blind against boulders in the dark.

I am consuming myself, breaking myself too, drawing close to a threshold I recognize from my first birth. Then, something gives, her body cleaves from me, and all at once she is on my belly. Bloody as a rare steak. Silent as a monk.

The midwife moves quickly. I don't seem able to feel fear, the same way I will not be able to feel my bladder or the tops of my thighs for weeks. The enormity of giving birth has caused several parts of my body and personality to simply gone offline. I do see the midwife knead the umbilical cord, and wonder in a distant sort of way if this counts as delayed cord clamping, a vestige from another forgotten birth plan.

The baby flushes with color. Though I am a voyeur watching this happen from some parallel universe, I am still grateful. She arches her back, splaying her tiny fingers, and for the first time this night someone other than me in this room is roaring. I kiss the crown of her head, and in the photo taken just after my lips are bright with my own blood. 

The flurry of the room around us recedes, and we gradually become aware of each other. Her eyes are unfocused and muddled the deep blue of dark matter. Tufts of hair spring directly, absurdly, from the seashell curve of her ears. Bruises are already starting to darken across the tiny bones of her face. I don't know yet that her collarbone is broken, snapped like a wishbone by the fury of my body. 

The midwife helps my husband cut the rubbery cord binding me to my daughter and I hold her to me, but she remains remote, a cosmonaut pinwheeling through the dark after her untethering. I hold her and try to put a positive spin on what has just happened, as my unknit flesh slowly adds blood to the pool around us and her newly broken bone burns in her tiny body, but all I can think of is the one-star review I saw once about Badlands National Park. Not enough mountain.

Finally, I remember what my mother told me, her second-born daughter, when I was born. I draw close to her ear so no one else can hear me whisper. We are going to be friends.

Why this way?

Why not? 

The sun spills over into the parking lot as we buckle her into the back, and I draw the shade of her car seat down. Birds are chirping their morning greetings to each other. We made it, I whisper to her, but she doesn't hear and doesn't care. For her, the fact of her existence is already as mundane as the tying of my shoe. She is fast asleep. 

Beyond our wedge of the world it is dark matter and stars burning and the roaring void of the unfathomable black hole anchoring our universe, but not here. The veil is already slipping closed, and here, it is just another day. An ordinary day, one that just happens to be the very first day of her life.

little soul little stray

little drifter

now where will you stay

[hadrian]

Nothing fills me with despair like hearing her toenails click on the hardwood floor at midnight, then two in the morning, then again at three or four or five. Each finger-snap of a footfall echoing in the dark house is an indictment. She is in pain. She is confused. She is not young anymore. I don't know what to do.

The horror movies have it wrong. It is not some grinning demon who fills you with the deepest dread, a malicious spirit or evil presence. It is the shuffle of one you love, perpetually in your wake, the sound of their mindless pursuit. Of what, it's impossible to know. Routine, comfort, help. Help her. But I don't know what to do. 

The pain medication seems to make her even more uncomfortable. She avoids the orthopedic dog bed. She will not eat the food I lay out in front of her until I go through an elaborate series of attempts to make it as palatable as possible, warming up various lunchmeats and shredding them over freeze-dried senior dog food, then switching to wet packets of dog food in a variety of flavors, then wet dog food in the only flavor she favors, then back to the freeze-dried food when she stops eating the wet food. 

Eventually the ants find these rejected offerings, setting off a loop of dumping out bowls when they've been there too long, putting out bowls of broth from our chicken dinner she only looks at long and hard before swinging her doleful gaze back to me. I switch the broth out for sausage, cooked one-handed in a pan while my daughter swipes at the stove, saying Hot, hot. Norah will watch me set this in front of her, with the same unreadable expression. 

I wish I could say I tenderly care for her in her distress, but truly, this gaze has driven me more than once to long for a gun. A slow death shaves you to your core.

Walking alongside those you love as their body disintegrates is a nightmare. They will topple, crumble, bury you under their rubble, and only after you have forgotten every single thing you ever loved about them, only when you are blinded by rage at the very sound of their cough or their footsteps or their tuneless whistling, only then will they leave this earth in a way that will wake you in the night for years afterward, the sadness like wet sand in your chest. 

I remember her fast. I remember her, head and shoulders out my passenger side window, tongue in the wind. I remember her running, muscles in her chest flexing, mouth wide in a dog laugh. I remember her smiling in her sleep. The striped shadows of aspens flashing across her back, slapping her paw in the cradle of my hand for a treat, her happy, happy, happy.

I can't stand this. I can't leave her now. The years of waking up every few hours at night to let her out, then go get her from the yard, as she stands there lost and watching the back fence. The years of trying to coerce her to eat, after her stroke. She is unlike me in every way, most of all in this- that for all the countless times I have shown frustration with her, she has never shown anger or even irritation to me, even though she is the one suffering. 

She deserves a good death. But as far as nature is concerned, a good death is like a good birth- still fucking terrible. The yawning void of the universe is, as always, beautiful and indifferent. Still I beg, Death, come soon, come gently.

Of course, I can do for Norah what was impossible to do for my father. A dog, at least, can be given a gentle death. I know this, but I canceled her first appointment with the vet, then made another, then canceled that one too. This, too, is my fault.

I hate death, for taking those I love, for coming too fast, for coming far too slowly, for revealing my true nature, always, to be one who can't take it. I recoil from the pain of others like a bug splashed with bleach. I avert my eyes from the gnarled toenails I can't bear to trim, the empty eyes I can't stand to meet. Cover my ears against the endless tap, tap, tapping that starts up in the very marrow of midnight, continuing every hour or two until dawn.

This makes me vow things to my small child that I do not now and will never have the courage to follow through on, caught in an endless loop of my own. When I get old, I will step off a canyon ledge, I say, to my disinterested one-year-old. She knows I am full of shit and doesn't even look up from her collection of empty yogurt cups, filched from the recycling bin.

Of course, I won't. I will want to live, despite everything, even up til the last. I think of the way Dad's breathing sounded near the end, his body pushing him to stay here, no matter the cost. 

Last night I couldn't sleep and I rose when I heard Norah, walked to the living room to find her circling aimlessly, a dog about to lie down who has forgotten how. 

As she staggered in an endless loop, and I stood there frozen, unsure what to do, I thought of the earth circling the sun in the long ages in the future when all life has burned away from our planet. Following its route with no one there to see the light come or go. It was never the act of witnessing that set our universe in motion, our bodies in motion, and it was watching dying that proved this to me once and for all. These things began unwatched and will continue, seen or unseen, until they can't. 

But she does have a witness. Maybe Norah isn't quite here anymore, but I am. Cringing, cowardly, raging against what is, but still here. I'm all she has. 

I called the vet back, scheduled the appointment again, apologized. It's okay, she said. It's hard. I get off the phone and lay a hand on her head. She's sleeping so deeply that she doesn't wake, unusual for her, a lifelong light sleeper. 

I check to see if she's still breathing, and of course, she is, her chest rising and falling as the winter sun fades to another night.

Years and years ago-so many years it makes me squint- my dad sent me an email.

K, Just found these John Prine lyrics. Immediately thought of you.

Blow up your T.V., throw away your paper

Go to the country, build you a home

Plant a little garden, eat a lot of peaches

Try and find Jesus on your own.  

(Naturally, I disagree with him on one point: You should RECYCLE your paper.)

Love, D

Like all of Dad's emails, it was short, sweet, and I saved it without knowing quite why. Hmmm, I thought. There's a good name for a blog in there somewhere.

Not too long after, I started writing here, a tiny corner of the internet I named after a snippet of a song that my father knew I would like. I was nineteen and living abroad for the first time in my life, spending a breathtakingly strange and lonely semester in Paris. It was a place that could not have been more different from the West Texas town I'd grown up in, and every day I felt a little more insubstantial, as I was swept along the metro, breathing the scent of flowers and raw sewage mingling after the rain, tagging along after the chatter of French I never quite caught in time. 

I wanted to feel like I existed again, so I started to write. Sometimes I wrote more, and sometimes I wrote less. There was a really hard year or two where I wrote not at all. But still, eighteen years ago, I planted this small garden, and no matter how overgrown it became, I always returned. Whatever else it was, it was mine.

It's the longest I've ever done anything at all. This blog is older than any job I've had, older than my marriage, older than even my now-ancient dog (to be fair, only by a few months.) I've had it longer than I was ever in school, longer than I've lived in any particular place other than my hometown. This blog has, somehow, even outlived my father. 

Dad once told me, Whatever else you are, you're a writer. It's a blessing and a curse. I've thought about that so many times over the years, how the root of my writing has always been my loneliness. When you can't figure out how to talk with anyone about the things you wonder at, worry over, think about, writing is a conversation that's always waiting for you. 

Only twice have I written for a paycheck, once an accident, the next an act of desperation. After that, I knew I'd never write for anyone else ever again. It's one of the only things I have that's just for me, that I don't have to do the way anyone else thinks I should. It's the only thing in my life that's just for myself. I don't need it to be anything more than that.

This summer, I thought about deleting the blog. My father died years ago, and had forgotten how to find this blog or read anything at all for years before that, and writing it without him has always made me sad in a strange and specific way. Even the idea of a blog seems quaint these days. Over the years, the ones I used to read slowly dropped off or became inactive, or private. Even I only post every month, or two, or three. 

But I just couldn't do it. I didn't realize how much it meant to me until I sat with my finger hovering over the mouse, about to hit delete. It feels like one of the only things I've made that I truly care about.

It's enough for it to just be here. A link from me to him, through time and memory. A link to anyone who ever read it and felt a little less alone. A link to myself at all those other ages, a teenager far away from home, a twenty-something flailing from state to state, a thirty-something mourning and celebrating all the new turns life has taken.

I'd like for it to still be here when I'm forty, and fifty, and beyond. I'm a pretty private person, but this is a small but true window I've given into my inner life, for whatever it's worth. Every time I've found a view into someone else's world, I've treasured it, so maybe this is my way of giving back to the many writers who have shared their lives too. Maybe some element of it will still exist on the eternal internet after I'm gone. A tiny echo of one small, happily lived life, one unruly garden among many.

Who's to say. If you can read this, Dad- I made it. I'm off to write a little, kiss my husband, chase my daughter, walk in the dusk of early winter to point at the last holdouts for Christmas lights. Settle down on the couch to feel my second daughter's small fluttering kicks, run my hand along my old dog's sleek back. I'll dream of summer, when I'll be holding our other little girl, and thinking of more things to write. 

If I'm lucky, there might even be peaches.

novel unbegun

half-loaf rising

lighthouse northward

and anchor south.

[rachel richardson]

It's a perfect afternoon. The second day we know of you. I'm walking home from the art center, pushing your older sister ahead of us. She hefts a crinkled plastic cup up and over the edge of the stroller, chuckles her intoxicating baby laugh, flings the cup up and away. I wheel around, grab the cup, hand it back to her, and we begin again. 

We fly down the sidewalk to the music of her giggling, the late afternoon fall sun dappling the sidewalk, a talon of marigold cutting through the trees to land across her cornsilk hair. I am thinking of you, and thinking of her, wondering how the two of you will be together, trying to imagine the reality of you here with us in just a handful of months, by late spring or early summer. 

The due date calculator I pulled up, still in shock when holding Miriam for a nap and realizing I was late, told me you would be incoming at the end of May, the same month I was born. Maybe early June, if you drag your feet like your sister. A Gemini, to complete our quartet. Your father is a Leo, I am a Taurus, your sister is a cavorting Cancer crab. Fire, earth, water, and now air.

Seeing the second line darken on the test- just a shade deeper than nothing- it mended me. Made me a penitent, a mystic, a prophet feasting on locusts. I was Moses, walking away from the burning bush. I was Joan of Arc, falling to the floor after her vision. I was certain I would never get pregnant without medical intervention, had given up on ever having a surprise this sweet. And here you were anyway, not knowing any of this.

The day we found out about you, your father was in shock. But late that night he wrapped his arms around me, put a hand over you, kissed my belly where you grew, and said We love you, little bug. We would love to meet you. 

Not even my dreams tipped me off to your existence. It was my lack of pain that let me know. I realized that this was the first day I was supposed to be hurting, and baby, I didn't hurt. Your gift to me, your annunciation, bringing the good news of yourself. 

When your father first found out, he said, Here we go again. His eyes widened, nervous. 

I felt only joy. 

The week after my first appointment, I heard the ding on my phone and got up, walked to the kitchen in the predawn dark. I had sworn I would wait til Ivan woke up before opening the lab report, but instead I clicked on it, one last secret to savor in those few minutes alone. I knew already, felt it in my bones the moment I first suspected you were with me, but I smiled anyway when I saw Female. One second daughter recognizing another. 

The day we first found out about you, I drove to your grandmother's house. I wasn't ready to tell anyone yet, but something about a positive pregnancy test pulls you towards your mother like the tide rising toward the moon. 

When we pulled onto her street, I saw a doe leaping lightly off her lawn. I hefted Miriam out of the car and watched her face, thrilled when she pointed. I assumed she was only seeing the deer, but when I looked back I saw the two small fawns just stepping carefully out of the dappled tree-shadow, following her into the light.

See you in the spring, little one. We're waiting for you.

Love, Mom

Rapunzel

I forgot

I forgot that you don't steal from the witch's garden and 

I stole from the witch's garden

There were dreams I'd had before but never remembered- 

The one where my father chased me around the side of the house and I fell, waking as he reached for me

The one where I found a three-posted door and inside was my perfect life

The one where a beast lived in the backyard and no one knew its name but me.

And still further back. 

Blood-smell, the chittering of rat laughter, the shape of not-yet things. I couldn't look at those. 

I ducked under their tangles and dusted the earth from my knees

And further back still-

Right up against the edge of her house, under the window where she waits and watches, was what I craved. Was all I wanted. 

That is what I took. 

In the dream I ate my fill and when I awoke, I knew.

But the witch knows too.

She knows.

I hear her tapping a finger on my window when I wake in the middle of the night

She says The child is mine in a voice darker and heavier than grave dirt 

Her nature is never to lie

Every child is hers, both the living and the dead 

She bellows like the ocean must have at the very beginning of the world 

She tells me the name of what I stole, over and over again, 

until it begins to sound like my name too