Today, the streets flooded and ceilings leaked, mercurial. On TV, firemen waded through apartments with small children in their arms. The lights went out and we swam to bed after having made a feast of every frozen shape in the refrigerator. The wind looked for something under all the eaves. The neighbor’s roof flew into the trees. All night the rain made loops of rope outside the window. Lawnmowers and cars floated by. Sometimes shoes, a nightstand, a red hot-water bottle. Tomorrow the sky could look like a field of helium. There’s a jar of salt in the kitchen, limes, a tin of sardines. Why should I line up my cares in a row like die-cast toy soldiers along the windowsill? Luck is bright as a soap-bubble. Luck is a river. Luck is the fickle and ancient carp a child could ride, his bright silk pantaloons improbably rippling.

1. The Premonition Did he listen when I handed him his glass of orange juice and vitamins the morning of that fateful ride? “That’s very interesting, Merlinda, but save your grandmother’s ghost stories for the kids at bedtime.” I tried to tell him of my dream, the death’s head a horse rearing up on its hind legs. A snake shedding its spandex, its spine a bleached carcanet. A handful of teeth, broken to rattle like amulets. 2. The Fallen Hero He calls every attendant “Nurse”. Twenty-four hours a day we lift and bathe, dress and feed, rotate, guide catheters, unburden into bedpans this man who flew across our screens, dark cowlick never once moving despite speeds to make time turn upon itself, dam waters fall back from point of breaking— smile sweet as a charm or an “S” emblazoned on a field of blue and gold. And of course the lucky girl gets the bit, emerges from where she’s buried under shitloads of highway runoff. No rags to riches story, but equally intriguing: a nothing, a brown speck set adrift from an unfamiliar planet or archipelago. It lands with barely any luggage in the middle of the night, adopts the wholesome speech of mid-America and goes to temp while waiting for the big time in the Big Manzanas: Gotham, New York, Amsterdam, Rome, Dubai— wherever it is, we’ve all been there. (That’s shorthand for unarchived work.) Cosmetics are key: I’ll apply a light foundation to the pallid, waxy skin, pencil in the brows that are no longer even there. The photographs will want even a shadow of the myth, arranged by women’s hands. 3. The Current through Her Arms The surgeons sliced a tendon of the fractured neck to better reattach head to body. Every now and then he has a little spasm— he says it happens when the body tries to send messages to the brain. I thought of coaches on midnight trains, of the vague destinations of refugees, the plaintive songs harmonicas breathed before bodies hurtled out of cars and into the hazy, unlit margins of sleeping towns. One evening, he shook as he napped in the hermetic silence riddled only by the hum of digital instruments. I bent to straighten his head, wondering if he ever again dreamed of power, the mind shining its steady miner’s light ahead before the explosive thrust into a core of basalt… When I stepped away, my fingertips glowed coral— as if, beneath the surface of my labors, some molten self had stirred awake, remembering its own dreams of flying.