Conjugations of the Verb To Be: Stories

Coming out of the lodgepoles were small tracks—a vole, probably, whose rounded nose, propelled by its strong little hindquarters, had plowed the snow in front of it. Ada could follow the wake of its movement from shadow to diamond-studded light. She imagined the tiny engine driving forward in all this blank coldness, the heart firing so fast that it hummed, it purred, as with one little foot at a time it clawed itself right to its destiny, a destiny that was fulfilled right where Ada now stood. For at her feet, the lifeline stopped, just like that, and imprinted in the snow, lighter than air, was the swoop of feathers, the spread of wings and tail, the fossil of an owl.

If he had seen Emma at all through the years, Holden had seen her as tough—tougher than her brother—and her arms around him confirmed that, but how small they were, thin ropes draping a portion of his ribs and knotted at his belly button; and then her chest, against his back, gave heat, but so tentatively that he felt if he leaned back to try to gain more, he would break her. She was like one of their kitchen table chairs, so fragile and rickety that he was afraid to move. And so he didn’t, and slowly, he felt two points of heat, but whether they came from his shoulder blades or her breasts, which he could now tell pressed against him, he was unsure. This awareness—that Emma had breasts and that he was confused—made him even more still. And so they remained, like statues whose bits of exposed flesh turned marble in the failing day, neither able to think of a thing to say.

A birth is full of magic. It’s like the empty box the magician closes up, taps with his wand, and spins round and round. When the spinning stops and he opens it, out comes something that wasn’t there before—a beautiful lady or tiger or dove, and all of a sudden you realize that you were waiting, knowing the space would be filled just right. The magic’s in the just-right part.
But there’s always a smaller part of the magic I like as much. It’s when the new baby takes something for the very first time from the world, and nothing’s telling it to, but everything is. It’s that first stolen breath, a big, startled one, the biggest one ever because the baby’s lungs have never had anything in them before. Nothing at all. After that, all the other breaths will be married up in pairs of in and out, except the last one where the body comes full circle and gives back what it took when it was born, and nothing’s telling it to, but everything is. And that last breath out is magic like the first breath in. The show reverses itself, and the space that was filled with something big is emptied out again. Poof…all gone.

Though the ice blurred him, she could tell that his hair was blond and that his eyes, which were wide open as if he looked on the scene above him with both shock and wonderment, were blue. The red came from his coat (wool, she supposed, and she was envious) that in the bite of some recent day had kept him cozy.