Women are hard to keep track of, most of them. They slip into other names, and sink without a trace. - Margaret Atwood

The body is so easily damaged, so easily disposed of, water and chemicals is all it is, hardly more to it than a jellyfish, drying on sand.

I sink down into my body as into a swamp, fenland, where only I know the footing….
I’m a cloud, congealed around a central object, the shape of a pear, which is hard and more real than I am and glows red within its translucent wrapping. Inside it is a space, huge as the sky at night and dark and curved like that, though black-red rather than black.

Happy as a clam, is what my mother says for happy. I am happy as a clam: hard-shelled, firmly closed.