Mother and Child: A Novel

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THE GREAT WIND came and the maple tree that had stood near the house for two hundred years split in half, and from its center poured a torrent of bats. Inside, the child was stepping from her bath and the mother swaddled her in a towel. Night was all around them. The child thought she could feel the wind moving through her and the places where her wings were beginning to come through. Soon it would be the time of the transformation, the mother said. The child said she was almost ready, but she was not ready yet.

Before bed the mother told the child a story. When your body begins to transform, you will bleed in a new way each month for several days. The child pictured herself as a fountain: a mermaid or a dolphin or a fish spouting blood and magnificence. She closed her eyes. In the Children’s Garden, the first rose was about to open. The child’s tooth was loose. She tinkered with it and listened to the mother and smelled her hard like an animal and loved her with all her heart. She felt happy to be alive in the blood conversation and in the night and the world that grew deeper and stranger and somehow brighter with her mother’s words. She held her arms open to the night, but her eyes closed; she could not hold on to waking life any longer.

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