I feel impossible inside myself. I talk to the baby and the baby is you, and I say, Here is a grid. Every day we will walk in this direction until we get to somewhere else. And then I come home and bury us in the bathtub, you floating on my floating thighs. White porcelain, mildewed tile. And so we do. We walk to somewhere else, every day, you strapped to my chest, your wobbly hands bobbling, passing dogs and giggling at them. On days it rains I umbrella you, and on days it’s cold you warm me up with your kicking legs, your many layers of wool. The streets here have low houses in pastel colors, doors opening right up to the narrow sidewalk. On some small hills, you can see the streets stretch around you, and the sky is low and blue and beach ball-like, the blue part, before it starts to stripe. Your hat is yellow, with animal ears. The houses are pushed close together, and there are window boxes, and sometimes there are flowers in them; sometimes we see a snake, and we sit down next to it and we look at it, the dead body a cuneiform, each scale standing out like something you can touch. The dead snakes are usually upside down, bellies to the sky, and sometimes I put you just like that, on a bath towel on the wood floor of our small house. You look like a drifter.
I sit down on the curb and my legs feel itchy and you kick at them, lift your face to places where there are places to look. A man walks by with a tall white dog. A group of children march together, plucking at plants as they go, buzzing a bit, like large coated locusts. There is a school down the street and the playground stands empty, bright mural on school building, bright twisty playground equipment: red, yellow, blue. We look for mint-colored things: painted brick rowhouse, painted cow eating painted grass. Shape of dragonfly cut into the sidewalk. The sky is the color of dim, patient steel.
The ceiling cracks above us. Above us, air hangs from its small hooks. I lie down, and I am on my back, and so are you, and our heads are their own headrests, and under my back are crumbs, just like camping: rocks through the dirt of the tent. The doorbell rings into the space. It’s metal, the kind you have to twist and then let go. It sets off an unwinding metallic whir, a rattling of teeth. You keep your wobbliness but start to wobble in your chin. The someone at the door pounds on the wood frame, creaks open the screen. I think of swamps and fog, cranes rising from it lightly. My heart pounds like it is alive. The door is locked, and the steps move away, but not before a garbage can gets kicked over, and not before a thousand metal sounds go rolling into the street. I put my head back down and then you start to cry, bursting yourself out of yourself. I hold your hand like it is a mouse that needs to be caught, a breathing mouse, a jumper. I imagine grass grows up around us and I can feel it on our bellies. When I pick you up, you are heavier than rocks, heavier than grass, a whole pile of it. I turn the lights on and my heart beats fast.
When it snows in the night it drifts in the streetlight, it gathers against the fences, it catches footprints of the animals that live here. I wear hiking boots to catch my grip, and I catch my breath before it leaves me. We walk into crystalline space, the snow still falling, ice crinkling between sidewalk and street. At the corner, by the convenience store, the man with the mustache stands smoking, one foot planted on the wall, his back leaning his body the rest of the way. He says hello, says hello to you specifically, and you wobble your feet at him in their tiny boots. Hello, he says, there was a robbery, and for a second I think he says something else. His store has moldy breads and dusty tops of jars, but he is a nice man and he likes you, and so I buy things from there anyway. I like this idea, that a neighborhood is made up of stores, people in them reading newspapers at the counter, threading us together. He stands outside waiting for the police and I wait there with him. We talk about cats. The day is cold and snowing still, and if there are any cats here they are hidden underneath it. I tell him maybe there should be fake cats, planted and planted and planted, to keep the birds away from gardens, and he tells me he likes birds, and I say I do too. I do. The bird of you against my chest. The police show up with their sad eyes, and I walk away, the two of us waving.
On television, a French man divides a lobster alive. Downtown, in a museum, there is a rhinoceros made of pink stone. A sword on which rabbits turn a man on a spit. A moth, in a box, with a moon on its wings. Outside, on a street corner, a father tells his kid to shut up. A lawn full of fraudulent starlings, too many for a spring this early to hold onto. This morning, a spot in California disgorged all its seals. This morning, mysterious sheep appeared on the streets and no one could herd them. The sheep were fluffy and square-eyed, spindly-legged and strange. They bumped against the buildings with the sharp concrete edges making divots in their hairs. A truck did not arrive to take them away. They did not have mothers, they did not have snow to cover them. They simply stood, nosing at things with their mouths. And then the night came and they dug themselves into holes and curled up into their own blankets. They congregated around the sidewalk cafes and in the library doorway and in the school yard. They were there forever.
We are in our house and it is morning, and there is screaming, high and wordless, sharp and bright and clear and scary. A female cop talks to the woman and a male cop talks to the man. The woman holds onto her elbows and paces. Her head is low. The female cop holds her own hands in her pockets, keeps her chest very still. The man brushes a bit of leaf from the walkway to their house; the woman stands with the officer on the sidewalk, alone. The man from the convenience store comes outside without a coat. I have seen this woman shaving, leg up on the sink, body naked in the window. I have seen her, in the summer, running: pinched face, light feet. I can see her now, breaking. The screams carry, loud and long after it’s quiet.
Now the dinosaurs feather and slip, soft and languid like any other creature. Now we know dinosaurs did not roar. Ice sheets bubble in the gutters. In a brown wood-shingled house all the windows light up someone in the kitchen. You could stand outside that house and feel warm, but also empty. Sometimes, here, it smells like the ocean: salt, kelp. I hold your hand and point to nothing. When I picture a house, I don’t picture the house; I picture the people who live in it, who leave things in the hallway and gather around a big table for dinner. I picture the girl we see—green ponytail, backpack—who takes off her backpack and does a slow soft cartwheel on the sidewalk, then picks up her backpack and walks again in the same direction as before.
Mice roam the kitchen like buffalo. Snow piles on the steps. We see a rabbit. We see a girl holding the leash of a bounding dog and laughing a throaty laugh. A man stands at a stoplight crosswalk, pushes the button. He wears a black fedora and eats a pink doughnut in small delicate bites. We see a black bird black bird black bird white bird black bird all lined up on a power line. At night we stare up at the stars like goons. We look and look: the film of colors on them, how far away they are. I hold you very close. How does it feel to be in a body?, I say. Here is a sheep, here is a ship, here is a flying horse. Here is the sky and there is the sky, and there, and there.
