I am pale as an egg and watching the moon. Thousands of eyes are alive in the trees. The bog floor is black. Moon peels her white glove and offers her hand. I put each finger in my mouth, then lick and kiss her palm. She bows. This is our last dance. This is my last night in this body. She asks me to remove my gown, and I oblige. I mimic the motions of her disrobing. She is a vision like me. The primordial parts of me, the parts I share with worms, thrum in response to her performance. She is rising like a dictator. 

I ask her again why I have yet to be consumed, what I must bring her in my beak. I have brought back hundreds of grubs, bee wings, the blackest wettest soil I can find, a half papaya, and three cracked eggs, all in a bed of dandelions. I place them before her and scuttle away to watch forest things peck and digest my offering. I track the damsels and dragons hovering above the pond. I thank the tiny ecosystem crawling and humming against my belly. 

Moon begins to rise, and I perch myself like a Sphinx, using the fashion of my posture to express my confidence and obscure my fear of critique. I am aromatic as tea; the mangy hounds bark from their chains. The moon beams across my withered petals and draws them out. Where once was a strange girl is a glowing pearlescent trumpet full of alluring psychotropic seeds, and a pair of menacingly large and beguiling eyes. 

I have altered myself enough to engage fully in the utter strangeness and horror of this magic, and le lune has offered the final transmutation. The pearls of which emit stinks unimaginable. I am alone here. Grandmother would be horrified by the drama and creepiness of all of this. Even mother, stupid and brave enough to create life, to swaddle its pink wiggly crudeness—who is she to determine the morality of this act? Every leader of mine lacks sensual mien, is an infant, and all my trust is here, between my legs, at the center of my consciousness. I think of one past lovers sorrowful perfume, but apart from this fetish, this talisman, I am fully loving the moon.

This must be the greatest show on earth: a mind-bogglingly large pearlescent trumpet illuminating the night, a pair of massive, beguiling cat-green eyes, a ruffled clown collar, and a pair of fleece legs to stabilize the whole of the beast. Dropping seeds as I pack my things, seeds which the shaggy hounds will eat and digest and give the earth again after its own transmutation. 

Is anyone seeing this? This, the greatest show on earth?

No—only I and the moon, and the forest things which will feed on the joy of my delicious body, which now surrenders to the midnight garden.