They told their wives, It’s probably nothing, as they sat at the edge of their beds just before dawn and pulled on their boots. All over town, the wives rolled over and touched the empty spaces where their husbands had lain—the sheets still warm, the pillows still dented from the backs of their oily heads. Lawrence, the wives said. Jackson, Philip, Earl. This was their calling song—the husband’s name, spoken dreamily and half-whispered, as the men went to the closets and pulled their shirts down from wire hangers. Where are you going?

The men looked back at their women—in their nightgowns and robes, nipples peeking tenderly through the fabric, eyes crusted with sleep—and they wondered what the Wheeler girl saw, if it really was a body, and if so, if it was the body of a man or a woman. It made a difference somehow. Somehow one was worse than the other. They cleared their throats. They felt protective. They turned off the lamps on their nightstands, leaned over, and kissed their wives goodbye.

She was an aerial blazing comet—hurtling with a determined velocity through the vast coldness of space, around the astral bodies and spiraling diamond galaxies, their arms outstretched, reaching, curving toward her as if to grasp her body, as if to draw her towards their centrifugal suckling mouths: the stellar nursery, the infant nebulae, the birthplace of planets and moons and other earths, less beautiful, less lonely, blooming now with the verdurous ecstasy of a newly minted soul.

She flew past the clusters of constellations, the lines between their points suddenly drawn clear in the darkness, vivid and bright and knowing—each shape becoming clearer, their flat edges suddenly bearing dimension and weight, the volume of a being. She watched the bears and centaurs and southern cross come unhinged from their fixed points and she gathered her favorite stars and stuffed them in the pocket of her dress. …Her fingers were made of a million burning suns, effervescent, tingling and pulsating, and she reached out her hand to touch the cold mud of a gray planet. She felt a shiver in her gaseous spine, sparkling, glittering, and broke apart the terrestrial plates to form separate continents of her own. Pangaea dead, her first murder, and she scraped at the raw dirt until her nails bled and the edges were formed: new shores, new oceans. A continent has no countries, she thought, peripherally, before there are people’it is all a single rolling place.

She strode easily, gracefully, down the side of her creation, feeling her feet haphazardly creating the valleys and the mountains and the soft swamps of lower ground. She cleaved handfuls of rock with her teeth and touched her finger to the shavings, alighting them and making them spin in the air, metamorphic beads: turning bright: to wood, to grass, to blood and human bone. She felt herself grow smaller. She looked over her bare shoulder, across the valley, beyond the mountain, under the twisting breaking clouds, but she was alone. She felt the earth stretch higher and higher above her, wild and unkempt, and before she lost the beautiful blazing thrust of a comet’s arm, she flung the stars in her pocket back up into the theater of space.

She felt, then, the notches of her spine click into place: hardened and connected, no longer the buoyant tissue of an astral body: she was mortal; she was a woman in a nightgown, sweating and turning in her sleep, reaching her arms out in the darkness of an unknown room, clutching the air, touching without feeling the fine gradients of moonlight.