YOUR FATHER'S FORMER LOVERS

You'll meet your father's former lovers, all of them, quite casually by accident the way one trips on a groove in the sidewalk, without ever having seen it coming. One by one they will parade in front of you, thinking that you-by some glitch in the system- could have been their daughter. You will be holding up no sign, not even a cardboard plaque bearing an identifying number, shoulder to shoulder on a ledger against blue painted chipboard at the local police station.

Under the tall lights, between the pale walls, they will peer into your eyes and immediately see the glisten of his light. For you, you are the carrier of symbols and stones, a body shaped into molded flesh of such uncanny resemblance to his. Eight years after your father died, his features began to appear on your face, stronger. Your character began to harden, resembling your mother's. The text told you so, history told you so, the wind billowed so, sown across the constellations. Brace yourself, for all these women, bearing faces of whom you've never seen before will seem like stickers in your un-peeling. Tools of the unhinging forces that carried them all to you that day.