Fierce Kingdom

There is no word for what she feels pushing up through her rib cage, pulsing. It is like a scream but with fists and claws

all the animals in the petting zoo hate children.

That is what you do when you have a child, isn’t it, open yourself up to unimaginable pain and then try to pretend away the possibilities.

if you can avoid seeing it, you can pretend it’s not there.

running, how, when the humidity is low and your muscles are loose, after a while you go weightless, sloughing off gravity, and the ache in your thighs and lungs gives way to helium, and you feel nothing.

Sometimes she can no longer feel her feet. Sometimes her entire body has turned to air. When she runs.

With a lover you might have a perfect comfort with each other’s body, a sense that his body belongs to you and yours to him, and you might have total unself-conscious freedom to put a hand on his thigh, to put your mouth on his in the way you know he likes best, for him to curl around you in bed,

His long eyelashes swoop down as he blinks, and everything about him is plumped out and soft.

he’ll sing away in his bed until the precise time shows on his alarm clock, and then he will grab an armload of stuffed animals and push open their bedroom door, announcing, It’s seven-three-zero. I’m here to snuggle.

and life will have gone on and this boy holding her hand will have turned into someone else entirely.