It’s true, I stole it, from the rock display in the children’s museum. I was picturing my breasts turning blue. I thought they’d inject me with something like food dye or ink, but gadolinium dye is invisible, and wouldn’t pool in my breasts either way. So I’m at the beginning, a ‘73 field guide, waiting in my gown with an IV in my arm. Almost all solids are crystalline, even organic materials form crystals when in pure state. Which is to say, I’m rock and they’re going to inject me with rock. All rocks disintegrate slowly due to weathering. I’m out of time. I tuck the field guide in my purse to return later. Sister. It’s my first time. Day six. There is comfort in patterns, until it runs out. They put me and Sufjan Stevens in a tube that bangs like the bowels of an excavator, but there’s a warm blanket across my back, and lavender oil and sometimes I hear that “terms and conditions may apply” because even in an MRI machine, there’s ads. A man designed it, one of the technicians says when I emerge with my ribs aching. I rip out the first page of the field guide, but can’t find the line I’m looking for and wonder if I imagined it—it made everything feel all right, the way when I was twelve and bleeding I remembered the patriarch’s daughter hiding her idols. It would be white in dark field. The end, that is, were it there. Turns out I’m blue. I hold the moon and an occasional unblinking fish. I am the mother everyone talks about, blue breasts dipping like bells. They make a mess of my sweater so I go naked to guard the field where my son is driving a wooden tractor through a cornfield made of wire and fabric. I help him harvest wild rice and sugar beets which is all he’ll ever have to track time. We go to the quarry and practice lifting rocks with tongs. We set them on a scale—taconite and petrified wood and honey agate. Honey, we say together. Honey, I say until he swallows me.

 

Elizabeth Torres is a writer in southern Minnesota. Her work has appeared in Ecotone, Pleiades, AGNI, and elsewhere. Visit her at elizabethtorreswriter.com.