The Centaurus

Pe

A blue jay, vivid in every feather, hung in the air motionless, like a hummingbird, but his wings stiffly at his sides, his eye alert like a bead of black glass. When he moved, it was like a stuffed bird being twitched on a string; but he was definitely alive.

“Peter, time to get u-up!”

Her wrist was in my lap, I was stroking the inside of her forearm. Stroking and stroking with a patience drawn thi

The back of my left hand felt hot and moist as it had when it was pulled from between her thighs; sap flowed from my extremities toward the fork of my body. I seemed delicately distended in the midst of several processes. When from downstairs a loud bumble came crashing, signaling that my father was going to look at the kitchen clock, I wanted to cry, No, wait-

“Hey Cassie, tell the kid it’s seven-seventeen. I left a whole mess of papers to correct, I got to be there at eight. Zimmerman’ll have my neck.”

That was it, yes; and in the dream it didn’t even seem strange. She became the tree. I was leaning my face against the tree trunk, certain it was her. The last thing I dreamed was the bark of the tree: the crusty ridges and in the black cracks between them tiny green flecks of lichen. Her. My Lord, it was her: help me. Give her back to me.

“Peter! Are you trying to torment your father?”

“No! I’m up. For Heaven’s sake.”

“Well then get up. Get up. I mean it, young man. Now.”

I stretched and my body widened into the cool margins of the bed. The sap ebbed. The touching thing was, in the dream, she had known the change was overtaking her, she had felt her fingers turning to leaves, had wanted to tell me (her irises so round) but had not, had protected me, had gone under to wood without a word. And there was that in Pe

“Rise and shine, my little sunbeam!”

My mother had reverted to a cozy approach. I knew the shiny gray paint of my windowsill would be cold as ice if I reached out my hand and touched it. The sun had fraction ally climbed higher. The dirt road had become a band of glowing salmon. On this side of the road, our side lawn was a sheet of old sandpaper that had rubbed green paint. It had not snowed yet this winter. Maybe this would be the winter when it would not snow. Was there ever such a one?

“Peter!”

My mother’s voice had the true tiger in it, and without thinking I leaped from bed. Careful to keep my skin from touching anything hard, using my fingertips to pull the glass bureau knobs like faceted crystals of frozen ammonia, I set about dressing. The house was a half-improved farmhouse. The upstairs was unheated. I stripped out of my pajamas and stood a moment relishing my martyrdom of nakedness: it seemed a smarting criticism of our moving to this primitive place. It had been my mother’s idea. She loved Nature. I stood naked, as if exposing her folly to the world.

Had the world been watching, it would have been startled, for my belly, as if pecked by a great bird, was dotted with red scabs the size of coins. Psoriasis. The very name of the allergy, so foreign, so twisty in the mouth, so apt to prompt stammering, intensified the humiliation. “Humiliation,”

“allergy”-I never knew what to call it. It was not a disease, because I generated it out of myself. As an allergy, it was sensitive to almost everything: chocolate, potato chips, starch, sugar, frying grease, nervous excitement, dryness, darkness, pressure, enclosure, the temperate climate-allergic, in fact, to life itself. My mother, from whom I had inherited it, sometimes called it a “handicap.” I found this insulting. After all, it was her fault; only females transmitted it to their children. Had my father, whose tall body sagged in folds of pure white, been my mother, my skin would have been blame less. “Handicap” savored of subtraction, and this was an addition, something extra added to me. I enjoyed at this age a strange i

Flames of cold flickered across my skin; the little proofs of my sex were contracted into a tense cluster. Whatever in me was normally animal reassured me; I loved the pubic hairs that had at last appeared. Reddish-black, metallic, they curled, too few to make a bush, tight as springs in the lemon-tinted cold. I hated being hairless; I felt defenseless in the locker room when, scurrying to hide my mantle of spots, I saw that my classmates had already do

Goosebumps stiffened the backs of my arms; I rubbed them briskly, and then like a miser luxuriously counting his coins I ran my palms across my abdomen. For the i