Domain

You came into the world with your eyes shut, Mary's mother tells her, and that's how you'll go. Her mother keeps a Bible by her bedside next to her Luckies and arthritis medicine. Mary doesn't sleep well.

Life is becoming harder to reconcile for Mary. Mr. Penns taught her in Biology that she is full of cells, covered in them, and she has domain over them, on a certain scale, movement and such. On the largest scale, though, those cells came from other cells, were begotten, divided, transformed into her, and will be taken away from her. She is Mary now, was perhaps a bumblebee or a compost heap, further down the line a sperm and egg, then Mary, and eventually an insect's wing or ash sucked through a marlin's gill.

She doesn't understand, how she is made of things she can't see with her bare eyes, how she is made at all, her body doesn't feel like a real thing, it's the voice in her head that's real. An inner voice that she doesn't really hear, not traditionally, with her ears. She doesn't get it: movement, emotions, pain, hunger, saliva, disease, thoughts. It's why people believe the things they do, she thinks.

Everything turns to ashes or dust, her mother says, so when the sun lights up her living room and gives shape to the stuff in the air, Mary holds her breath.