Like a twentieth-century dream of Europe—allhorrors, and pastries—some part of me, for all timestands in a short skirt in a hospital cafeteria line, with a tray, whilein another glittering tower namedfor the world's richest manmy mother, who is dying, never dies.

There is dancing and laughter in hell, an angel weeping openly on a park bench in heaven. My mother, dead and frantic in an attic. A white shirt on a floor. An old man in a wheelchair, rubbing his eyes. Here it is, here it is! the occupational therapists sing as they rise to the surface of the earth, smiling, bearing their terrible surprise.

Something wild was going on in that coffin….I was growing shoots and leaves and blossoms. Moss. Bugs. Worms. She leaned over my corpse to kiss my lips, but they were warm instead of cold, and then she realized the dead girl wasn't me at all. Who was that? Who was that dead girl squirming with life? And then she realized- That was her. Our bodies had been switched. Mine for hers.

It's impossible to imagine my mother like that. I cannot imagine her softened, thawed, decayed, becoming sweeter as she spoils. I imagine her trapped in a mirror instead. A permanent image of her locked into a rectangle of hard brightness, open-eyed.

But, perhaps, I should have known then, I should have known that night, standing in the kitchen, that foul meat in the air- looking back on it now, I see that it was the end and the beginning of something more than dinner. More than ruined appetite, a postponed meal, a marriage strained, a freezer unplugged. I could smell the death between them.

The last hour waiting patiently on a tray for her somewhere in the future. The spoon slipping quietly into the beautiful soup.

When I built my luminous prison around you, you simply lay down at the center of it and died.

Hidden in the works of a mysterious clock are her many deaths, and yet the whole world is piled up before her on a banquet table again today. The timer, broken.

We would never be together in this life again.