We are the spaces between great men, the sky glimpsed between the limbs of trees, the silences in the symphony of history, the fiery white spaces between scripture's black letters. We sense the energies in space that you may see matter clearly, and our magic makes ordinary reality possible. We are the center without which the world falls apart. We are extraordinary women that there might be great men.

  My associates and clients see me as a powerful businesswoman nourishing fortunes with a skilled hand. I write contracts that balance the wealth of nations. I take what I need to live well and to provide a legacy for those who come after me, but these business transactions and possessions modestly disguise the influence I wield in the world. Mortal actions place my hand on the loom of the global economy, but I weave an immortal thread through the fabric of history. I descended from a gold vein of women flowing from an immemorial past. I am an uncommon woman, but I was once a common girl, blessed with a rare childhood, and then an impatient teenager, eager to taste the world.

  In the summer of my fifteenth year, I often wondered if I would ever be as beautiful and powerful as my mother. When would my mother let me do the things she could do? She hadn't had me confirmed yet, and she even held me back from the Eucharist (I was not properly Christened as a baby) because, she said, the transubstantiation was too much for a child to bear. Our priest, Father Tony, had pressed her on this subject more than once, but she would not be moved.

  My mother sometimes toyed with Father Tony because his lust for her did not suit his office. She would have liked a saint for the local parish priest, but since she had to settle for a horny suburban cleric, she had to keep him in line. She would look inside him, and finding lechery simmering within him, she would sweeten his mind with an overwhelming urge to climb upon the table and do a tap dance. She would keep at it while Father Tony gripped the arms of his chair tightly in desperate resistance to the dancing urge. My mother and I -- along with Edna who had a habit of blatantly watching us from the port hole in the kitchen service door -- thought Tony's desperation was hilarious, but the poor priest must have felt the horror of the fly that became hopelessly mired in the treacle it coveted. My mother would release him suddenly, and he would fall back in his chair, his face reddened with embarrassment and his mind darkened at the thought of his inexplicable urge to break with ecclesiastical decorum. Father Tony did not have a strong faith in God, but my mother gave him a strong belief in powers of temptation.

  One evening when he came to dinner, Father Tony went so far as to start humming "Putting on the Ritz" before my mother let him go. He became quiet for a minute, and then with beads of sweat glowing like tiny diamonds on his pasty face, he once again attempted to persuade her to allow me come to mass.

  "All of our girls attend mass while they're in CCD, Jane. It's required." He took a sip of his Scotch.

  "Here's to courage," I thought. Mommy darted a glimpse at me.

  "By whom?" she asked the priest.

  "Pardon?"

  "Who requires all your girls to attend mass?" My mother spun a slight sneer around the word your. "Does the Pope require this?"

  "Well," Father Tony swallowed hard. She was doing something to him. I could tell. "No."

  "Well, then, it isn't necessary."

  "If you allow your daughter to singularize herself, she will not learn the disciplines of the faith."

  "My daughter is not singularizing herself. She has no say in this. This is my decision."

  "The Eucharist is a sacrament, Jane."

  "And she will have that sacrament when I have properly prepared her for it. Not before."

  Yet it seemed to me then that my mother had precious little time to prepare me for anything. Mostly she left me to my own devices at home alone with Edna, our housekeeper, and the gardening boy. Yet now I am not so sure this wasn't her way of preparation.

  That night I dreamed Mommy called to me from somewhere in my room. I rose from my bed and followed the sound of her voice. I found her, framed in the blue-tinted glass of my mirror. Or was that my reflection? We both had great sprays of auburn hair like halos of fire, the same prominent cheekbones, and intense blue eyes. The image flickered between my mother's image and my own reflection. I peered into her eyes, my eyes, and the alignment of our pupils suddenly gave me a clear but fleeting line of sight into the past, and I felt that I somehow knew that I was becoming a woman like all those who had come before me.

  I woke feeling my mother's presence in my room. But it was already late morning and she had been at work for several hours. Suddenly, remembering my dream, I threw off my quilt and went to my mirror. I could see myself naked in the blue-tinted glass, and it was as if I was seeing myself for the first time -- my fiery hair, my budding girl breasts, my once-stork-like legs now shapely, and between my legs wisps of dark hair like thin brush strokes. I realized in that moment that I was no longer a child. But neither was I a woman. Not yet.

  Edna rapped twice and I jumped back into bed, covering myself quickly. She brought in my breakfast tray. At her heels was Perk, freshly trimmed and perfumed, his wooly hair cropped close and topped with a red ribbon tied in a bow atop his cute ratty little head. Edna placed the tray on the bed, said "Good morning," and left -- she knew I hated to be bothered with polite chatter in the morning.

  As always, Edna had prepared my breakfast to my specifications. But for the runny yellow yolk of my soft-boiled egg, my breakfast tray was a still-life in red: The thick slices of beefsteak tomato, the dollop of ketchup for my ham, the clot of plum jelly on the English muffin. Beneath the scent of the eggs and ham, redolent of base barnyard animal passions, I could smell the red.

  My schoolmates would never believe I could smell colors, but then at my sixth birthday party, I offered to let them test me to their satisfaction by naming the colors of things they held under my nose. I remember sitting there blindfolded, surrounded by a coterie of giggling girls dressed in starchy crisp dresses and taffeta petticoats. Their staccato shrieks and laughter were punctuated with breath-held silences of anticipation as they held another color under my nose. As I would call out blue or green or indigo they would launch into yet another shrill atonal chorus of delight. Of course, they wanted to know the smell of blue -- like ozone jetted through melting snow -- or of yellow -- like the coppery taste you get when you put your tongue on the terminals of a little nine-volt battery -- or red -- like the stew of the juices from life's most vital moments. Mommy caught me at this, though, and at first I thought her sharp tug came from one of my hyper-excited friends, so I was surprised to see her stern face as the blindfold disappeared from my head. She angrily whispered in my ear that such displays were gauche and I would stop immediately, then directed us into a sedate game of Candyland.

  Afterwards she lectured me that we are not circus animals performing tricks, and the greedy unwashed masses would rip off my nose for display in the Smithsonian if I were not careful. "You are not a freak," she said. "Don't act like one."

  I ate breakfast greedily that morning. I was hungry as much for the color as for the food, and Perk lay at the end of my bed worshipping me. He didn't really care that much for me -- he just loved to watch people eat. He was my dog in the sense that he had been provided for my entertainment in the same way that a princess may have a monkey from a far away New World to grace her pretend court, but Edna took care of Perk, and she was his alpha dog.

  I don't know why after that huge breakfast the thought of a steak came to my mind. Perhaps it was the sunlight glistening on Perk's coat and the glimpses of pink skin on parts of his body where his hair was thin. Maybe it was just the beckoning red ribbon atop his head. For whatever reason, I looked at Perk, embraced the whole-bodied sense of the dog with my eyes and mind, thought about steak, and that was what he became. Or more precisely, he was now a finely marbled rib-eye, cut about three-quarters of an inch thick, laying at the end of my bed as if in the final thaw before the grill. Seeing what I had done, I felt sick, so I escaped to the kitchen where Edna was busy prepping food for that night's dinner.

  Edna was not so much a housekeeper as a salaried surrogate family member. She was like my mother and I, only weaker. A few years before I was born, my mother found Edna begging on the streets, a battered woman with a terminally ill daughter. Sensing that her desperation was genuine and that she was one of us, Mommy brought Edna and her daughter into the house, and despite the thousands she spent on medical care, Edna's daughter died not long afterwards. Edna's husband attempted to reconcile with her, but when she refused, his clumsy attempts at sweetness turned to threats and violence. Then he was found dead in the street: He had been a walking time bomb for years, the coroner said, and a huge aortic aneurysm had finally exploded. Edna has been with us ever since.

  I sat there moping in the breakfast nook where Edna had spread several cookbooks. She hovered over a row of tiny plucked bird carcasses, and I wrestled with the vivid thought of how only hours ago these pale naked things with their legs splayed and body cavities gaping had been a covey of quail. Edna could see immediately that something was bothering me. "What's wrong?" she asked.

  "Nothing."

  Edna shrugged and turned back to her quail, and I stared out the window beyond the garden, beyond the pasture, beyond the horizon. I sat there for at least an hour, trying to think about anything but the steak in my bedroom, thumbing through cookbooks, and thinking how the way people cooked was strangely laboratory-like and unintuitive. I mused on how, as an adult, I would compose dishes as collages of flavor, sound, color, and love. Then the cookbook fell open to a picture of steak tartare. I slammed it shut.

  "Your mother's got me fixing two dozen of these stuffed quail," Edna said, as I fiddled with the measuring spoons, "and only six people are going to show up tonight. I just know it."

  "Hmm," I said, unable to feign interest.

  "I wish you'd quit fooling with those spoons and tell me what's the matter."

  "I turned Perk into a steak."

  "You did what?"

  "I turned Perk into a steak."

  "Lord, child, you got some imagination in you. Well, why don't you go turn him back?"

  I hadn't thought of that.

  I went back into my room, and upon my thought, Perk was back -- all doggie grin and heavy panting. I sprang to the end of my bed, tipping over the breakfast tray which Edna hadn't had time to fetch, and hugged him. He seemed surprised by my lunge but not at all upset by his metamorphosis. It was I who needed reassurance, not Perk. I realized he was fine and lay back to think while gazing at my egg- and ketchup-stained bedcovers.

  Any girl would have panicked after realizing she had turned her dog to a prime cut and back. But then ordinary people don't smell colors or think to people. Ordinary people live in a shadowy cave -- they don't really know what it's like outside. I do. I was no longer upset. I was quite pleased with myself.

***

My mother kept a gardening boy in the loft of the carriage house that she had converted into a garage for her European fast cars downstairs and servants' quarters upstairs. Edna, of course, had a suite in the north wing of the house, so the boy lived alone. My mother had found him in the parking lot of a day labor shop -- he was down on his luck, eager to work, and professing a magic touch with plants. Even though she intuited something was not quite right about him, she felt he made up for it with his looks and an animalistic physical presence. I loved watching him caress the earth with his bare hands as he nourished the plants that he grew there. I could see the love in his touch, like soft and diffuse sparks of St. Elmo's fire between his fingertips and the green stalks and leaves. It seemed as though all the flowers were smiles of the plants vying for his attention and affection, and, as though all his strength and gentleness tapped into an inexhaustible well, he loved them all equally and unequivocally so no plant lacked with hunger or thirst. And when I watched him long enough to know these things about him, I watched him some more to see if perhaps he were somehow extraordinary as my mother or Edna or I. He dug, transplanted, hoed, weeded, and watered. On rainy days I watched his silhouette dancing with unimaginable grace, a figure cast against the glass walls of the greenhouse like a shadow that had weight or like an angel in the stained glass window of a church.

  That hot afternoon Edna was out and my mother was at the bank. I thrilled to the solitude, threw off my clothes to feel the velvet of the heat against my skin, and walked through the house to the south wing and out the doors to the pool where I relished the chill of the water and the weightlessness at the deep end. The blue of the tiles pervaded the water and made a wonderful drone in my ears whenever I dove into the pool. With all my senses bathed in this sweetness of airy blue, I felt as though I could stay underwater forever, and I had to remind myself to surface now and then to breathe.

  As I treaded water, I saw far above me in the sky the towering anvils of thunderheads with their surfaces profoundly complex, like cotton balls blooming in a spring gone mad. I could see hundreds of images, reflections of the earthly things in the clouds above -- the gardening boy's neck and shoulders under the weight of a heavy bag of sheep manure, the dome of a church, a trinity of pigs' heads. And then like a swarm of bees, I could feel the gathering charge of electricity along the ground, so I knew it was time to leave the pool and go indoors. My mother had warned me -- since birth, it seemed -- that we were the superconductors of the human race, and lightning would strike us not once but repeatedly if we did not take care, so I went inside and upstairs to the guest bedroom overlooking the pool.

  Besides, I sensed the gardening boy somewhere nearby.

  He must have walked past the pool after I had gone upstairs because I spotted him in the greenhouse. He was repotting some plants, and I thought of myself as the daisy on the bench before him, striving beneath his rough and unrelenting touch. I was overcome by it, and while my mind lay abandoned and senseless in some far corner of my being, the thunderstorm broke loose outside, and my experience burst in all the colors that flowers can be.

  I fell asleep and when I awoke I was late for dinner, and outside the rain fell in torrents. Rather than risking being discovered walking naked through the house back to my room, I ran past the greenhouse, through my own garden and into my room. Dripping wet, I looked out my French doors, and now his shadow swayed in his carriage house window, and I wondered whether he saw me, and then I knew that he had. I could feel the blood squirting through his veins, each pulse like a sledgehammer crashing onto an anvil.

  During the night, my mother's voice called me to the mirror. At first I could see only myself in the glass, but then the gardening boy appeared next to me, and we were both naked. He graced my shoulder with his touch, and I could feel a gentle flow of energy from his fingertips into my skin. His finger traced a lazy French curve from my shoulder, around the outer curve of my left breast, into my waist, and out to my hip, and then a trail of sparks arced between us as he lifted his hand slowly from my thigh. My body was a lightning rod for the electricity in his touch, and he ignited me in a consuming blue flame.

  I woke with that fire in my veins, and I felt I had to find the gardening boy to understand what was happening to me. Over my head I slipped a sheer cotton nightgown with the essence of distant India running through its weave. With my arms stretched high, I could feel such power as I had never felt before, and the knickknacks atop my chest of drawers moved slightly as I lowered my arms. I'd never done that before: I thought of the stories my mother told me about my grandmother who, as a kind of snoozing poltergeist in her later years, moved objects in her sleep.

  I got out of bed. Peering through the curtains, I spied the gardening boy as he worked amongst my flowers, and my heart pumped fire. My mother was at the bank, and Edna was out on her frugal shopping run (as if my mother needed a housekeeper who hoarded coupons from the Sunday paper, but I guess it put a challenge into Edna's life). I had the house and the gardening boy to myself.

  I slipped silently onto the stone porch outside the French doors and into my garden. He was still digging little holes and slipping peat pots full of fragile new growth into the freshly prepared bed, and I was able to read and study him slowly. His mind was simple and open -- not inscrutable like Mommy's or Edna's, not tense and restless like Father Tony's, and not childish and wobbly like my schoolmates'.

  The gardening boy's mind was just simply there in the task: the grain of the trowel's wood handle; the resistance then surrender of the earth; the weight as he lifted a scoop of earth from the hole; the feel of the peat in his hands -- coarse and warm and fermenting with the biology within it; the pendulous inertia of the spindly stalks as he moved the plant into its hole; and then the sensuous cloddy wealth of the earth around his hands as he pressed it around the plant.

  I followed the shifting tensions in his shoulders and arms and imagined this symphony of motion around me. I studied the musculature of his back and felt alive in his strength. His taut haunches as he humbled himself before the bed of plants felt like steel magnetized with love. Then, like a baby taking her first step, I dared to picture the teeming sack between his legs and the elastic flesh draped there in anticipation. I was filled at once with fear and fascination, and I wanted to look away but I could not. Goose bumps rose in a chill down my arms and legs and a blush spread lightly across my chest.

  So I called him. He stood and walked toward me. I made him see me with all the flowery tenderness of his plants.

  "You're her daughter?" he asked.

  I didn't answer aloud, but I cast my thoughts into him, and he went down on his knees before me as I willed him to do. I pulled open the neck of my gown and let it slip over my shoulders, over my breasts that sprang back from the caress of the passing cloth, down around my hips, rushing across my thighs, and the gown lay in a rumpled mound about my ankles.

  Now I would give myself to him, and I pushed into his brain this illusion of surrender. He leaned forward to kiss my thighs, and his perfectly caressing tongue pushed forward in a gentle relentlessness that filled me with terrifying desire. His hands gripped my hips and pulled me against him, and then his gentle fingertips bathed my skin in his electric blue fire, and my breasts filled with my pulse until my nipples were hard as stones. I felt myself falling into an abyss, so I grabbed his hand and took him with me -- into my room, and into my bed.

  I knew that it would hurt, but it seemed little more than getting my ears pierced, and he was so gentle with me that first time -- as I wanted him to be, as with his flowers. I did not know how good it would feel despite the hurt. I was surprised to learn how well my body accommodated him, and how well his mind accommodated me.

  That night there was a full moon. My mother, Edna, and I took supper in the small informal dining room where we could eat, as Mommy would say, "in the intimacy of our family of three." We had left both the inside and the outside lights off, Edna had placed a candle at the center of the table, and the whole garden was bathed in pale steady blue moonlight reminiscent of a deep February chill. Large white tropical flowers opened like cups to catch the moonlight.

  In candlelight that flickered like an old motion picture show, I saw in my mother's face all the beautiful faces she had ever had: the round-faced girl-child in awe of the world; the high school girl feigning maturity to gain license to explore the adult world, and feigning innocence to hide the mischief of her explorations; the Princeton woman who chose her path through life with clarity of purpose and the sureness of power to come; and now, at 43, the woman of perfect grace, balancing discretion and the benevolent use of awesome power to better the many parts of the world she touched. I knew little of her abilities except what I had seen incidentally, as when Father Tony visited us, but I knew she shielded me from knowledge the way a mother shields her sleeping infant from the world with a blanket. Yet I felt certain she could raise and lower the tides if that were on her mind. How, I wondered, could I ever begin to be as powerful yet as good as she? With every new ability I discovered in myself, I also found a new prank, a new bit of mischief, and now the supremely illicit pleasure was a fresh memory in my body -- my skin glowed, sparks leapt among my fingertips, and inside me I could feel the peppery ejaculations of the gardening boy between the thundering incessant rhythm that had conquered me and left me craving his touch.

  Mommy turned her loving face to me and asked, "What did you do today, Alice?"

  Somehow I found the composure not to run out of the room, but to look my mother in the eyes and lie. And though I had an inkling of her power, I was also naïve enough to think she would believe me. Even if I couldn't yet lie in my mother's league, I was discovering new confidence.

  "I read," I said. "And I played Frisbee with Perk in my garden."

  "Oh," she said. "I noticed your flowers were a little mussed." She sipped her wine and added, "You must be careful not to disturb the beds while the flowers are taking root. We don't want to upset the gardening boy -- good help is so hard to find."

  "Yes, Mommy," I said.

  Of course my mother's warnings -- whether innocent or knowing -- could not deter my passion from evolving into obsession. You must understand that I was very young, and the gardening boy had started in me a wildfire beyond my control.

  I called him to me everyday. I invented Byzantine errands for Edna that kept her out of the house for whole afternoons, and I basked in that boy's insatiable fuckings from the moment Edna passed out of our gate until the moment her package-laden arms slammed shut her car door.

  I had to push him off me to get him to pull out, and even then it seemed as if he were somehow connected to me, and I was still open, poised like a suspended kiss, and waiting for his next thrust.

  I learned to wash my own sheets under the curious and territorial glare of Edna, for we flooded my linens with wetness. But if she suspected anything, she never let on.

  Each day, I called to him with my mind, and he, thinking that this was all his idea, would eagerly appear at my garden door. At first I had just surrendered myself to him, but then that wasn't enough, so then I learned to wrap my arms around him and to press against him. Our hips crashed together like two church bells on the eve of the Apocalypse. I was trying always to find that more, more, more, and I searched for it with every sinew, and he met my search with a frenzy of his own. But it wasn't enough, until I woke one night in my bed to find him already deep inside me and my body fully aroused, seconds away from an orgasm that exploded with thermonuclear might. I was lost in a paroxysm of ecstasy. I was every color and no sense. My intellect and my powers lay cast off in a corner of my mind like shed lizard skins still holding the wrinkled forms of their wearers. I told him I was sensitive now and would he please, please, please stop, but he kept going while I squirmed in rising fury beneath him. And finally with the break of dawn I convinced him that Edna would be walking through the door with my breakfast at any minute, and we would both be in a lot of trouble if we were caught. He disappeared in the glare of the morning sun, already casting its heat through my windows.

  Edna did indeed enter my room early. She met me as I came out of my shower, not to deliver my breakfast, but to tell me the police were here and wanted to speak to me.

  Two swinish balding men with breath smelling of cigarettes, coffee, and cream that had soured in their mouths stood on our trellised front porch where Edna had left them waiting. I asked them inside, and they stepped into our entry hallway. I sat on the chair and they on the bench which my mother had brought from a monastery in England. I offered them coffee, and they declined. One of them said there had been a series of rapes in our neighborhood and I must take precautions, while the other fondled my breasts with his eyes through my robe. They thought perhaps the rapist had been seen on our estate, and handed me a mug shot. It was the gardening boy. Had I seen this man? No, I hadn't. I should be careful, they said. If I saw anyone like him I should call them immediately. I shouldn't open the door for strangers -- the thought crossed my mind that Edna had -- and I should keep all doors and windows locked. I should take a business card, which was held slightly out of my reach so my robe would part and they could see my breasts. I should have a nice day. I should come to some sleazy motel so they could fuck my brains out while their dicks rubbed in one hole and the other, back and forth, one against the other, like sticks starting a fire. I should get off my high horse. I shouldn't be a rich and snobby bitch. I should come live in a house of daughters and learn how to make a man happy. I should smile more often.

  I stood there in the doorway as they drove away and the gardening boy's semen oozed out of me and onto my sticky thighs. It was the morning before my confirmation, and I took another shower before Edna drove me to church for confession.

  "Forgive me, father, for I have sinned. This is my first confession. I am 14 years old. I am mean to our housekeeper and make her do things because I want to make her life hard."

  "Why is that?"

  "Because I can."

  "You must be kind, child. The Lord carries with Him all the powers of the world, yet He loves us."

  "Yes, Father. And I was mean to my dog, too."

  "Do you hurt your dog?"

  "No, but I turned him into ... something."

  "We must be kind to all God's creatures."

  We paused. I did not want to go on.

  "Continue, my child," Father Tony said.

  "Sometimes I am willful and dishonor my Mommy. I do things I shouldn't when I think she won't know."

  "What sort of things, child?"

  "I made the gardening boy do it to me."

  I felt a flash of red rush through his mind, like a blush -- not on his skin, but in his brain. And his chest grew tight: he breathed like his face was in a pillow.

  "Did that boy have sexual intercourse with you?"

  "I made him do it. I wanted him to."

  "You don't know where he came from, Alice. Your mother would kill him if she knew."

  "You won't tell her?"

  "I can't. But as your spiritual adviser, I should warn you that the devil is in that boy. You must stop for your sake."

  "Yes, Father."

  "The flesh is a powerful thing -- only the sacrament of marriage can contain it."

  "Yes, Father."

  "Is there anything else?"

  "No."

  "Say three Our Fathers and six Hail Marys. And I insist you seek further pastoral counseling with me to get back on track. Go and sin no more so you don't stain your purity before your confirmation tonight."

  It was as if he'd already forgotten the weight of my sins -- or was it that I did not really feel absolved? His voice was so flippant that he reminded me of Edna telling me not to spoil my dinner by eating too much candy.

  Yet my mind was already set on what I had to do.

  Edna and I had salads for lunch, and I told her that I would like to have purple orchids and a honey-cured ham from Jake's Meats at my party tonight. That would keep her busy for a few hours.

  When Edna cleared the gate I went into my garden and summoned the gardening boy. He appeared, handsome, sweaty, smiling, and wearing only gym shorts.

  "Now? Is Edna gone?" he asked.

  "Yes, but wait. Stand there. I want to study you."

  "OK," he chuckled.

  "OK," I chuckled back, "slip out of your shorts so I can study you."

  "OK," he said. He slipped the elastic band down his hips and legs and stepped out of his shorts. He was naked just like that. It was the first time I'd seen his penis without an erection.

  I stared for a moment into his eyes until I knew I had him fixed like a bug, pinned and wiggling on a wall. I slowly coursed my eyes down his aquiline nose and across the lips I had kissed so deeply. I paused on his cleft chin before diving into the bulging tendons and pulsing arteries of his neck. I caressed his hulking shoulders with my eyes. I traced the definition of his abdomen, thighs, calves. I played to see if I could make his penis stir -- which was all too easy -- and taking him all into my eyes like one easy breath I turned him into a pig.

  I led him through the gardens and locked him into Perk's dog run. I would worry about what to do with him tomorrow. I had to get ready for my confirmation.

  I think for most girls, confirmation is a matter of dressing pretty and demurely and having a kind of holy birthday party before the eyes of proud parents. If God is there, they cannot feel Him. Maybe they are religious and strive awkwardly and blindly to commune with the Virgin Mary. Their emphasis is on rite -- mine was on passage.

  When Father Tony held the wafer in the air and the bell rang three times, I could see the transubstantiation. It was similar to watching one of those sped-up films of a flower blossoming, except inside the bud was human flesh. When Father Tony broke the wafer I could feel the pain, the agony of all my weight suspended by flesh too weak to hold it, hanging like thin slices of meat on hellish hooks, and then more weight, all the weight of all the sad corrupted flesh of all the world.

  Even before the bells began to toll I could see the aura about the cup, a diffuse warm glow through the silver as if it held a spark from the great fire that gave life to the universe. I could smell the bloody living red of the wine without seeing it -- it was so pure, so coherent, that I was certain I could smell it even if I were miles from this sad, suburban building.

  When I ate the Eucharist wafer I could taste human flesh. The wine was blood in my mouth, the pure red for which I had sought for so long. I could feel the release from the pains of this world, and the voice of God spoke to me in a language that transcended words. I had a glorious future ahead of me.

  At my party that night my mother pulled me aside.

  "What can you tell me about the pig in the dog run?"

  "The police say he's a rapist."

  "Did he rape you?"

  "No."

  "Do you believe the police?"

  "They're rapists, too."

  "I know. I talked to them. I am sorry you had to deal with that. I didn't know about the gardening boy. I didn't check him out as I should have."

  "That's all right, Mommy. I took care of him."

  "So you have, Alice. So you have." She smiled and handed me her wineglass. "Alice -- I think you're going to be stronger than I am."

  I did not say anything as I accepted the glass. I tasted the red of the wine, looked into the intense blue of her eyes -- my eyes -- and knew she was right.