And Dorothy tries to reconcile that wanting with the two hundred square feet of the past fourteen years of her life and knows that it is at once perfectly unified and irreconcilable. She knows that seven months to the day later her father got an offer to bring something else into the world, and that sitting at a card table while a woman looked straight down the barrel of his eyes and selected him for greatness was one of those happinesses from which a person never recovers.

She knows that the fortune-teller was named Tanya, that she has since gone into real estate, and that at the time that she pulled Their Lady of the Corkboard out of her deck she was nineteen, a college dropout with a baby girl in the back room of her apartment. She put silver dye in her hair on Saturdays and told unusual fortunes because she got bored, and because people tipped higher when she said extravagant things. If Dad had ever looked near her left elbow he would’ve seen the book on urban legends she was reading between appointments. She knows that Tanya did not for a moment imagine anyone would take her seriously.

Dorothy guesses she won’t have to do her math lessons anymore. She remembers filling out the scholarship application for those with Dad in time to take them instead of seventh-grade math, the warmth of his breath just above her shoulder, and how proud he was when the acceptance email came. She knows that he had a beer that night, and considered a future where she went to college, and away from him, and that he had not really thought about that before.

Always, Dorothy assumed that her father was hunting the King for a reason, that there was a plan she never knew, that they might sell the first bite of fat and live well for the rest of their days, or that he wanted to use it to find her mother, that he had a question, an earnest, urgent question that drove him to the road, to the desert, to a myth’s hunting and slaughter.

But there is a similarity between Dorothy and her father firmer and more defining than genetics. Dorothy sees that her father wanted the fat for the same reason that she took it, because she was able, because it was there.

Dorothy turns, and sees her father coming through the doorway.

The Changeling

My parents tried to define miscarriage for me with a plastic anatomy doll.

My father had bought it at a school book sale the year before, when I was in fourth grade. The doll was one of a pair of figures set back in a cardboard box, a man and woman posed in identical skeletal rigidity. Their skin was translucent, their genders identified not only by their anatomy, but by the fact that, while the man was bald, the woman had a clod of sculpted hair fused to her plastic head. Under their skin, a tangle of blue and red veins was visible. You could open their hinged bodies at the hip, and lift their insides away in layers, clear skin to veins, veins to russet muscle tissue, tissue to organs, and organs to twiggy skeleton. Their genitalia was detachable, and the woman came with a miniature, plum-colored fetus. My father squatted on the wooden floor of my bedroom. With a tremendous earnestness, he opened the woman, and commenced to take her fetus in and out.