Came with the flowers, weaving through them, a scrabbling of some mutant desert rat, then the tingle-hops of the three long legs, and a grappling as of two of them at play, sproing and spring, then gone. Came a fast-sharp slither of a two-tailed snake, headed after to eat the insects dislodged by their passage. Then peering out, subsonic arguments tin-tin-tin in the dark bird’s ears, alcohol minnows, whose gills distilled moisture from sand, stitching in and out, the glint the glint the glint. Their small dramas played out before this statue of a dark bird.

The way the mice chased the grasshoppers and the grasshoppers pretended to be flower stalks …

Idyllic, could have been to be silent nocturnal, on a hill, on a darkling plain. To not think. To not conflict with the internal. To watch the stars. But:

Murder control. Murder control. Feasting of a sudden on good gristle meat. Delicate ankle. Elbow. Feasting in the dank dim glow. Unpredictable. Let loose. Loosened. The rage so familiar, like breathing, that the dark bird felt only the aftermath, which was a kind of weakening.

Why should this impulse always be impulsive. Unable to tell if there had been a command, because there was now just an echo. Was it the echo of a command? Or was it nothing?

Comforting weight of the journal beneath the dark bird.

Murder control, read me another story. Just one more story. One about me, this time.

No matter how terrible?

No matter how terrible.

Even if it’s not really about you?

I know all the stories are really about him.

~ The Ugly Duckling ~

My father always said, “I’ll whip you if you don’t get it right,” so let us pretend I got it right in the end because it was never as gentle as whipping. But not every being can get it right the first time. I do not blame some in the magical garden. Their heads were not on right or not right away. Their angles were all wrong. They could never be like my duck. My duck was my luck, my pluck. I could never call it dark bird like the others.

But she was a duck—a plucky duckling who existed atop a hedgerow pedestal made of flesh in the magical garden. Queen of that place. Queen of my childhood. Duckling eternal. For I’d had the dark bird as a duckling for twenty years before she became a duck. A foundling found when I was but a child of seven. Or ten. Or zero. Or three. One of those. And she was left on our doorstep.

But where was that doorstep? Erased with my mother is every place I ever lived before the Company building. Should she be a hologram or holograsp beyond reach, I ask only that she once was real, so that I am too. What became confused is whether the provenance of flesh should sit heavy on the mind shoved inside.