Carolyn Oliver

On a machete’s blade a baby crawls toward a chapel archway whose stones spell out a name, though the baby cannot know this, and anyway is occupied thumping at its own steel reflection. Before the archway glowers a taxidermy weasel, at least twice the size of this particular thumping baby. With
great effort the weasel smacks its stiff front paws together once, twice. The lamp nobody noticed, its shade the color of a midsummer moon in wildfire season as seen by a baby from space—so an ordinary fuzzy color—switches on. Now the earth baby looks up. Reaches for the lamp, causing its
milk-glass body to crackle and lie trembling on the machete. The space baby weeps. Satisfied, the weasel, now anointed with baby snot, creaks off its pedestal and into the surrounding forest, and if
the babies merge, become life-sized, and follow, you will greet your future in the shape of a battery
or a hunk of pin-oak driftwood clothed in #2 fishing line and your rival's favored perfume. But if
the earth baby pushes the gasping lamp into the ferns, crawls through the archway, and enters the chapel alone, disregarding the space baby’s consternation, you can be saved solely by ten-thousand-year-old sedge grass discovered alive and thawing in an ill-lit tunnel. Or by flame caught in a gauze curtain.