Tomorrow, I’ll show you to a stranger. Not on purpose, of course, but we know the changing rooms at the gynecologist’s office are never private. We’ll wear a Pepto Bismol gown and Margo will stiffen because of the draft caused by observational rooms, their doors left open just a crack to see the glow of ultrasound screens.

He would have nothing to do with death. He didn’t even believe in such a thing.

This is a different kind of dark than the one beneath a bedcover, more like the one inside a fist, a dark where we can’t see our own arms and can pretend for a while that we haven’t yet been booted from our mothers by that god who gets paid to kick girls out of the womb...

They gave me a card with a cat meowing Goodbye on its cover. Inside, names and short notes. We’ll miss you terribly! Good luck! Safe travels! Keep in touch! Take pictures!

I wish you were there, author of my predicament. Then you might have understood.

Fuchsia Pukash was not beloved among the humans of the neighborhood, and they were right to dislike her.