The Found and the Lost: The Collected Novellas of Ursula K. Le Guin

by Ursula K. Le Guin

So she was born out of me on that last long wave of unutterable pain, and runs free now. She returns, she comes home, home at four in the afternoon, milk and a cookie, can we play by the creek, never yet gone longer than overnight or farther than a school excursion, but she runs away from me. I feel the string stretch, the fine cord of ethereal steel that she’ll keep pulling out so long over the years, so fine, so thin that when she’s gone I’ll hardly know it’s there, not think of it for weeks, maybe, until a sharp tug makes me cry out for the pain in the roots of the womb, the jerk and twist of the heartstring. I feel that already. I felt it when she took her first steps, not to me but away from me. She saw a toy she wanted, and stood up and took her first four steps to it, and fell down on it in triumph. She went where she wanted to go. But I can’t run after her. I must not pursue her, making her my prey.