For"three nights I slept deeply, reaching down in the darkness to touch the edge of my death. Soon I would be there. Soon. I felt a lightness that was like the lifting away of time, as if life were nothing more than the tedious effort to keep from floating away. I belonged to the sky. My sadness was little white clouds. But on Thursday I awakened heavy again, a dull cramp lodged in my abdomen, and when I got up it moved slowly like thick fluid into my groin. I said nothing to my mother and left for school. In sociology, taking notes on a lecture on kinship, I suddenly felt that my bowels were about to empty, and when I stood up to leave there was liquid running down the insides of my thighs. I hurried to a restroom, afraid to look at the floor, and in a toilet stall I found my underclothes soaked with pink water. I took off my clothing and blotted myself with toilet paper, using nearly the whole roll. Then I swaddled myself with my slip and put my blouse and skirt back on. My body was still damp with sweat. I walked carefully out of the restroom and headed toward the truck. I would go to the trailer now. But as I was crossing the lawn, my body gushed again, and I looked down to see real blood running down my ankle into my shoe. I tried walking faster, but a sharp pain cut through my lower body and brought me to my knees. I saw the blood soaking my skirt while people came running toward me. Then their hands were on me, laying me flat on the grass, and the sky went dark. I became conscious again as medics were lifting me into an ambulance. A man no older than myself sat beside me, stroking my arm and sometimes wiping my face with a cool cloth while the ambulance speeded me captive to a destination that wasn’t mine. I was quiet while they carried me through the emergency entrance and into an elevator, but when they had rolled me on a high bed under a strong light, I heard my voice screaming and screaming from another part of the room. Bodies in white cloth surrounded me, and a rubber cone came down over my mouth. When I awakened again, I was somewhere else, and a woman’s voice close to my ear said, “Your daughter is alive.” My daughter was alive. And so was I. When I saw her she was no larger than a hand and had such tiny parts I would not have thought she was real had she not been crying. And that is when I saw that her mouth was mine, that already she was this replica of myself. What had I done? A sprig of bones, a tendril of lung .. . how much blood could there be in a body so small? As I stood by the incubator, feeling as flat now as an empty coat, I watched her cry and cry, clenching her body like a fist. This was a child of mine. My heart, healed once for death, broke open again. I could not hold her. My hands were unworthy, I suppose, and I only saw through the plexiglass of the bright terrarium where she cried and squeezed her eyes shut against the light. But in a dream, I drew my finger along one cheek and rested it on her mouth, which pursed against it to suck in the semblance of a kiss. That was all. Her dark eyes opqned to the light, and the furious crying ceased, never to begin again. I am not a librarian. I earn our living in a welfare office, typing the records of the poor, and that is a good job for me because I understand the errors of misfortune and how they occur. The office is in a city far from Fayville, hundreds of miles, and where we are now we may not be in another year, or the year after that. We are working our way elsewhere, for I have taken my father’s maps to heart after all, moving as his hand did across the pale countries and blue waters of his dreams. My way is slow, but once begun there is no end tojt, this moving away, not only in miles but over the sheer distance of time, I and an ever- silent child etched in my brain like a shell, a frail fossil of myself. I began my journey when my parents died within months of each other, my mother first of a fierce strain of the flu, then my father, insensible already from a stroke which had left him staring from his chair as if appalled that death had stopped just short of its mark. He died with his hand in mine, grasping with surprising strength as if endeavoring mightily to pull free from himself at last. I looked at him, knowing he had gone from behind his open eyes, and wondered where his life was now, whether it was still there or had been immediately drawn away. I know I am travelling because every day, whether I am moving or not, everything becomes more strange. What I am saying is that nothing is new, I have always seen it or the likes of it before, but the meaning changes, and what I knew yesterday doesn’t matter today. Every day, I tell my story to find out what it means, and it is never the same. What I am saying is that every day I weave my net over this space known to us as our life, and what does that have to do with the day before or the day after? The wind always blows it away. If you listen to the wind, really listen, you will find that it blows constantly, it never stops, and it is the sound of life, a great breathing that you cannot change, nor can you change what it takes away or brings back to you. As well be angry with the wind as with life for blowing past you or through you or taking your web away. As well be angry with life as with yourself, that you are here, breathing with the wind and following a strange path. I am alone now in our white room across from the slow-burning tree, for the hour has grown late while I’ve been tracing my footsteps through another time. But it is not only the wind and my wandering thoughts that keep me awake. It is also the silence in the darkness where Lynn Margaret sleeps. That silence seems stranger than anything else, and it is the only thing now that I fear. To hold our bond while she sleeps, I take her bracelet from the table and slip it on my own wrist, raising its cool fires by slanting it toward the light. What I have been saying is that there is nothing to know, only that the meanings are different each day you open your eyes, and that is all I know. I and Lynn Margaret, she knows it too, and indeed it was she who taught me. I stand by her room, trying to hear her breath through the night wind, but I cannot, and it is as if no one were there. It is always like this. When she sleeps, I think she will slip out the other side of her darkness and leave me behind, and each time she awakens, I am glad she has not. I would not want to be truly alone. Sharon Lynn Pugh is a writer living in Bloomington, Indiana. Her last story in CSQ was “Long Season Without Rain.” Anne Storrs is an artist living in Portland. The Image Gallery 1026 S.W. 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