Lullaby

The hair on her back was unbelievable, clumped as it was in irregular patches that shifted and re-formed while she slept. On a given night, the clumps might resemble a blotchy Rorschach test--she would see an ominous thunderhead in the mirror, I a loveseat--but by morning they would have transformed into a working map of the Philippines.

I admit, I was taken aback when I first saw her naked, but she wasn't ashamed--no, she was proud of her brilliant pelt. She just smirked with a shake of her head and guided my hand over the coarse blond prominences. The feel was almost electric.

Later we would follow the changing maps on her back into stifling jungles to capture rare albino lizards; into burnt-out holy cities in search of Moses's toenail; into an Arctic winter so cold it took three fingers from my right hand, just to recover a stone said to cure hunger and the occasional gallstone--we would grow rich several times off the black market fantasies of her glorious and curséd pelt. But that first night I knew nothing of the future. I only sensed the strange power that radiated from her as she snored away, the shocks of hair taking shape with a dull rustle beneath her comforter.