The marionette—the cricket—the boy turned into a mule. The lonely virgin father drifting in the gloom of her belly—Monstro, the whale that swallowed his ship. Once, I accepted every word—that a whale would hunt a man, carrying her vendetta through the ocean’s cold desert, & that a man swallowed—Geppetto or Jonah—would not be crushed in the mouth, bones dissolving slowly in the belly’s acid, but would wait there for the son he built to find him & summon a fire that, defying biology, would force the beast to sneeze. In the story, it works: Father & son escape; the puppet boy loses his strings. That is, becomes mortal. Will one day arrange for his father’s funeral; will be a middle-aged man still wincing at the sea; will grow old, telling tales no one believes & awakening from dreams of a mule—its mournful brays familiar, ears gone gray.