My mother always told me it would hurt the first time and I would bleed. That’s how it always is. It’s going to be revolting, but you have to do it anyway or your man will stray. Eventually you get used to it. The girls at school say it’s like being punched in the stomach, but from the inside, and in the back seat of the car, your head keeps hitting the window like a dumb bird, bam bam bam. 

My mother is obsessed with a flock of feral parrots that live in Stuttgart. They were born for a tropical climate, to eat fruit like leaking wounds, to steal from the sun, bellowing light at their enemies, but in the city’s winter, they roost above a traffic intersection, where the air is imperceptibly warmer, and the only available food is snow and twigs. If they can endure winter, you can weather anything. Eat up, your snow is melting. You can’t continue the species on an empty belly. 

At school, the boys form a hole with their thumb and forefinger and plunge their other forefinger into it, sawing back and forth, trying to shock us. While we write on the blackboard, they laugh behind our backs and shout Megan Fox! when we try to speak, lobbing the name back and forth over our heads, daring us to confiscate it. Dropping it on purpose, wiping it off on their laps. They can alienate us from any name, taunting us with the fact that sound cannot be caught, that their thoughts are untouchable, castled in their unbreachable skulls, heavily guarded by the silt-filled moat of an unmoving world. I do not want to exist inside their minds, so I summon a demon by sowing a bedsheet with my blood, seducing a slit in my palm. The demon is a Fox. She bounds across the bedsheet like it’s a field of fertile snow, delighting in the cold. When she speaks, froth frolics in the corners of her mouth, fangs of disintegration. She says if I really want, she can possess me, and I can take vengeance on anyone who wrongs me, past or present or future. She says I could break the skulls of those boys, scatter flocks of their thoughts. I could bring the bodies to those parrots, giving them a true warmth to roost over, their plumage steamed clean by carcass heat. Then I could eat the parrots one by one, delivering my mercy, lugging their bones home in my belly, spitting them at my mother’s feet: your lesson will not survive me. Undoing the bolts of my jaw, I pry myself wide, and the Fox bounds inside my mouth. It doesn’t hurt at all. She spreads through me like fire, cauterizing my palm from the inside. Fur bursts from my mouth, a bushel of flame. I rise like smoke, kindling for my Fox, and I will never get used to being a god.