ANGELINA GEORGACOPOULOS
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ORIGAMI
I. Fortune Teller Pick a color. My soft, nail-bitten finger pointed to blue. Which number? Seven, my favorite. My classmates crowded in as Lisa moved the paper seven times then unfolded a flap. You will have….eleven children. Everyone squealed; our oracle had spoken. Maddie would have five, Rachel would have three, and Sadie would have none. In those days, we thought of children not as people, but as names. Buttercup, that’s what I would name the first of the eleven, Cinnamon the second. After the bell rang, we went back to math class, trailing in the smell of chalk and wet grass. I watched as Lisa played over and over again under her desk, cupping it around her hands as she looked at the results. She wouldn’t show anybody what she had gotten, and after playing so many times, she must have had varied results. Mother to many and to none; later I would learn about Schrodinger’s cat and think of her. To have no direction, like a ghost ship adrift at sea, would have been unthinkable. Go to college and get a job, then get married. I was following a red string into the future, moving paper and picking numbers. Everything was within my grasp, given to needy hands by privilege and circumstance, until it wasn’t.
II. Rabbits He couldn’t have known about my aversion to rabbits, yet the gesture seemed infinitely malicious. Even with synthetic fur and a fabric tag sticking out of its rear, the stuffed rabbit held an ominous presence that reminded me of the one from my childhood. I had been visiting a friend at her house when she took her male rabbit out of its cage and let it roam as we sat cross-legged on the carpet. I picked it up and put it in my lap and that’s when it began humping my leg. For a moment I was frozen, trying to figure out what was happening, then I screamed. Rabbits disgusted me the more I learned about them. They bred endlessly, in a way that reminded me of holding up a mirror to another mirror and watching the display of infinity. Rabbits could outbreed wolves and rifles. They could probably outbreed humans, too.
Santa Fe Literary Review
55
