Lily’s head led her into a white room where the carpet lurched into a lotion so hot her nipples melted, cooled, then slid right off. Hours before, at the tanning salon, she sat in a gold-knobbed chair and coolly questioned other girls about the parts of her skin she will never control: tiny inexplicable bead-drops of brown dripping down onto her shoulders from outer space, little light bulb-gods hexing up a deep, itching pink. In the end, she tells them it all peels away. The white room, pregnant with steam and sweat, is curated by Lily’s very own mind but coroners of an older, more arcane stoma of science gave it life. No matter is safe, no atom guarantees it will stay. Once her nipples fell, she cupped two warm black eggs gently in her hands because what breaks ceases to mystify her. As fast as Lily’s mind can swim within itself, dimension yields and the walls are throbbing chests of cornered felines, maybe the mealy innards of a mantis-hued gourd. Once, it was her own body poured, uninspected, and then split four ways.

There was a time when the white room could not exist. There was a time when Lily had a green lion for a father but her mother would not marry him. From the last fragment of their alchemy, Lily ignited, cauterizing each channel of his heart until he became flesh and bone. Her mother’s molecules were curdling long before. Inside them, wet, dark Lily grew. Though it is said to be impossible, she remembers the first white room she ever entered. She cannot remember exactly where she was three afternoons ago but some sort of modern science occurred. If she held the thought long enough she might recall, in its place, the first time she set conditions to create life. Following that, she might revisit how it felt when the bloom finally unsealed itself. She caught sight of it on her way out, in the sun, one floret too bright to call coincidence. In her white room, it yellows gracefully.

All her wigs are lined up by hue, each nestled atop a torso-less mannequin, just heads, and of course a sight like that can frighten anybody, especially a kid as young as me, yet I find a footstool from her closet to get a closer look where they sit like glass-eyed zombies, freaky, ghostly, these facsimiles of women who are not my mother. I recognize nothing but the tinny odor of her hairspray, remembering how that was always the last application after her shower and wardrobing, accessorizing, checking makeup in the mirror. I am strong but I admit to missing her, to needing the warm wind of my mother’s breath down my neck as she napped. That time seems not so long ago, like night which was up and then gone, a curtain drawn then opened. So now I do the damndest thing. I close my eyes and rifle my fingers across the plastic cheeks of each mannequin. I picture skin and a face, pretty. I touch there but not the hair, the wigs which are styled perfectly.

She was a boulevard of a woman, with black-eyed dreams and absent tears. She’d carried a bastion of troubles in her doughy hands, crushed and creased them into fine grains. This was long before her lies caught up with her. Her terrors were mauled and buried deep, no lingering voices, no midnight gasps. Her cloud of hair could have housed a welter of wildlife, small enough to hide, sharp enough to bite. The green of her walls was the green of her longing, chilly and somewhat related to nausea. She spoke in tercets when she spoke at all, not minding if no one paid heed and edged closer to the brick and stone of buildings, rough but silent. Her stories were knit by a madwoman, knotted by a drunken sailor, pounded down like cheap meat ought to be. The head of one and the tail of another. Bridges, burnt stew, apple rot, arguments. Quelled clamor, when sleep would come out of stolen grace. She was a woman thick with the slums of faraway countries, yet marvelous. We knew her only in pieces and plenty missing. We knew nothing of the glue that kept the pieces together, only that it was failing, losing its suck, and the pieces were falling erratically, one by one.

Don’t you sometimes comb your hair because it feels like the warm hand of affection? I don’t want to confuse things but it’s possible that nothing matters. I just mean, don’t bother gesticulating if it’s not going to be grand. Make your breakfast cereal tell me moonbeams shoot from the glory holes of my eyes. Your sneakers compete for my attention. The trees you cut into graves could at least invite me in. But what’s in a day? They pass like shit on a factory production line assembled by ladies with hairnets on their feet and men with two beers on their minds; who could you convince to care about an evaluation of these things, good/bad, like a reality television show competition about canned food in a church basement or convertible couches in the backs of vintage cars? You’re sleeping in the warehouse of my cellphone and I keep thinking about drowning it just to prove to you how much you want to get out.