By fifteen, you are a clock without the destination of time. Sun, crawling towards sloppy strokes of summit behind suppertime rain. Your daughter clings to your left breast as if it’s a planet straying. Squeezing milk like foam from cleaned rice. The veranda of this wind-cracked Dutch manor overlooks deserted servant huts. Clay, wilding in purslane and pigweed. No different than how your womb has begun to starch with absence. Near the hacked trunk of a moringa, worms have tunneled corridors into your placenta. You buried the cord but still see it binding your wrist to her defenseless composition of breath. A new constellation flowers from every cry. You never needed to need anything before this. Death hurries from the cities into the countryside. Over tea, you overhear your husband and his brother rumoring. The Japanese have begun crowding Dutchmen in coops and pribumi are next. Hearing this is the first violence your daughter inherits. In sleep, you hallucinate flayed arms reaching. Awake, she reaches for her father, who at night, squints through the laced shadow of tree wings with a machete. Already, she doesn’t belong to you. You want to risk the impossible. Snap the past’s jaws to keep it from parroting. But how can she be the one to redream your childhood. She doesn’t yet know about the djinn’s blade, germinating in her marrow. The dream–she will walk out of your clutch into the bonfire of prophecy. Her small hand, waving at something in the nothing. The dreams, the dreams, the dreams. Aren’t dreams.

Aren’t dreams archives of light. Aren’t dreams mangled renditions of unswallowed facts. Your perverted caricature lugs a swaddled doll to a lonesome river. Stalks and fronds strand on burnished stones, making gills. The bank, one big fishbone. You aren’t sure if you’re running from or running to, feet absorbing fallen rattan teeth. The doll is laughing. Or maybe screaming. You feel it will burn out like dew as the day gets old. The cliff regurgitates pieces of itself, stacks jagged slabs as if a wind giant is arranging them into cairns. Aren’t dreams destruction. Aren’t dreams introduction. You arrive at the water. Sheer, or maybe so black there seems to be no life underneath. Your face is drawn on the doll’s with crushed cochineal. When you submerge its spongy body beneath, the breath bubbling pops with tangs of persimmon. The act is one you beat your soul against, repeatedly, until a hatch spawns through your dream eyes. Crying, you pull the frozen doll to your chawed nipple. It coughs out its brief oblivion. Years from now, when she is sixteen like you are in this moment, the doll will ask you about this shared reverie. You recalibrate the details. Ngerteni ora? There is no excuse, just the desperation to save the doll from what it can’t understand. You will laugh because it’s the only salve. And when the doll tells the story of her attempted murder, she will pageant it as a jest.