Thousand: Six Hundred Ninety-Eight

accidentally, perhaps, like a lioness licking one cub while the other bumbles off, she tastes claws down in her tummy and feels the tickles of a mane against the slick granite of noon. The girl closes one eye, then closes the other, and under a blue and yellow sun sees a dancer shift from a fifth foot to a sixth out in the sandy rubble. The hands of the dancer flutter like doves, six on a side. “Have you hurt me?” she sings, the words in a language the girl has never before seen, the meaning an intricate imbrication on