Kathleen McGookey

Translate your life into an equation and scribble it on a billboard— variables, parenthesis, equals sign. Reduce the ex-boyfriend in France to a square root, the builder who couldn’t read blueprints to an imaginary number, your mother’s missed diagnosis to the power of one. Leave the answer blank. Math’s comforting and reliable: change any figure to arrive at a different, more elegant solution. Such an equation is more valuable than a time machine, because even if you met your younger self stepping off a yellow bus or locking her grad school office, she wouldn’t listen to the earnest, graying lady you’ve become.

Numbers clarify, like a magnifying glass or a telescope. Put this billboard bearing the equation of your life somewhere near the World’s Largest Truckstop on I-80, where the brown grass in the median sways. When night falls, your inscrutable numbers will blink in the headlights like constellations. One of those travelers might be a girl so different from the girl you once were that to her, the flash of the billboard looks like a door cracked open, a little light spilling through.

Only the slender words swim this far.

My luck lives in a rice-paper house I keep on my bookshelf. She doesn’t mind the dust. Her heart is a broken black cricket, wings slick as oil. Maybe today she will sing. I feed her what I catch--spiders, rose petals, a hawk feather or two--but she never says what she requires.