Janet McNally

You can't argue beauty's not an accident, the particular heft and angle of a chromosome's spin. A tarted spangle, bright lanyard twist, the slip of cells weighting this boat uneven from stern to prow. We're all skittery as marbles on  a marble floor. Beauty stays, then goes; it fades, we say, something about years and sun, the nights we slept in makeup and left mascara like ashes on the pillowcase. We burned through every one of our dreams. I wasn't always a stepmother, you know. There were whole years when I was a girl. But now, these ladies sell me moisturizer, stand close in their lab coats, pretending at science in a fog of perfume. They wield a contour brush and my cheekbone pops. The magic settles uneasy; it turns out fairy dust was always fake. And the lipstick's made from beetles, shells crushed vermillion. My color is Fleshpot, they say, it's Folie or Fixation. It's Wilderness; it's Artificial Earth. They can't quite make themselves care. We'll waste it, they know, whatever we've been given.

If you believe in snow, you have to believe in water as it's meant to be, loosed from clouds arranged like asphodel. Because that's what it's like to come back: a slow surfacing, memory spiraling away. You can sleep so long, whole seasons are forgotten like a hospital-room plaster, spidered with cracks in Portugal shapes. You can love sleep like water, love your heavy limbs pushing river and ocean aside. After Maggie woke, the doctors had her stringing bracelets of semiprecious beads, and she couldn't stop counting the kinds of blue. Here, summer, in the high shade of a ginko, she pulls up a handful of stones on silk and we drink grapefruit seltzer, listening to the tinny chime of bubbles rising to the air. She can't remember autumn, so we tell her someday this tree will drop its fan-shaped leaves all at once, golden in the October crush of every plant's frantic strip show. Later we'll see mountains through the scrim of empty branches, and if we can look straight up into the atmosphere, see the same plain old sky revolving. When we ask Maggie what color it is she always says iolite, picturing beads like raindrops, shining azure on the table. She forgets that sometimes things don't stay where you leave them, that the sky fades to white even before snow begins to fall. It's hard, but we have to tell her even sapphires don't glow blue without some kind of help.

I once loved a boy who built batteries for pacemakers, miniature machines that could glint a heart to life. There were no secrets in his fingertips; to make sure, I held them to the light. Even so, he had learned a way to make a pulse. He might have set it down like a wind-up toy: a small bear stomping across the table, escape on its mechanical mind. Now, my own steps stutter when I sneak into the hospital and figure out how to bring you back. With me comes every girl I've ever been, holding hands to let the current shiver through us like spun sunlight: flaxen, fizzy, a memory of miles, of measure, time tangled together, copper wires in my palm. Hello, gorgeous, give me your hand. We've been waiting for you. So rise, girl. Wake up.