Thrust: A Novel

She opened wide her palm, inside of which was a locket. Without taking her eyes off the pearled knot of the umbilical cord, she opened the locket to show me what was inside: a lock of hair. She meant to make her trade.

“Whose hair is that?” I had become mesmerized, not by the macrocosm of the room but by the miniature world of her hand and its object. Of course, the thought that seized me — before logic could challenge its absurdity — was that it was a lock of Mary Shelley’s hair, the locket the very one I had proposed an elaborate fantasy to steal. But the girl cut into my fantasy like a thief.

“Your son’s,” she replied.

A sound came out of me, something like a laugh, but incredulous: a puff of voice and air. “But I can assure you, I have no son,” I said flatly, an odd weight on my chest.

“You will,” she said, leaving a cleft of silence between us. “With Lilly. You will be whole. In a different time.”

I had no earthly idea what she meant by that, but I took the locket from her hand to examine it more closely anyway.

“Liza,” she said. “My name is Liza.”