See Also: Shape of the Universe

I called my mother's breasts Weeble Wobbles, I don't know why. Except that maybe when she bent down to get a shirt out of the bottom drawer they looked like something both weighted and empty all at the very same time. Now when I bend down I see those same breasts, breasts that have fallen despite the jingle daring differently.

There will be no image to go along with that paragraph.

I have a birth mark on my right thigh like a thumbprint. Over the years it has become dotted with freckles, a smattering is what I guess one is supposed to call something like that. Instead I call it my freckle farm, and each spring when I once again warm my legs in the sun I find that I have missed it, my birth mark.

I used to have beautiful feet.

But this is not about my body, believe it or not. My freckles or face or the faint scar on my stomach shaped like the continent of Africa. No, this is about me in mourning for Zoey's tummy. Her pot belly. Because suddenly it's gone, the round curve of her stomach now flat with time. She has grown, stretched out, and last night as Bryan and I watched her sleep we both whispered it: she's not a toddler anymore. Who knows the exact parameters of what happens when; more important are the long legs thrown from the covers like that, the vector of her tummy a different degree while the curvature of a straight line remains zero. Three and a half.

She is three and a half, three years and eight months if we are to get truly mathematical, equal to the inverse and extrinsic. She has one dark freckle on her back and no scars, eyelashes I imagine on a deer; one of her front teeth is very slightly crooked from when she was learning to walk and did not. The oldest she has ever been and the youngest that she'll ever be and yet I cannot help but try and flatten time. When next I see her tummy curve like that she will be a woman and pregnant maybe, her own baby inside, my grandbaby, the points sharply bent into a circle the only constant.
Neither here nor there, but this: for Christmas I asked my dad for this yellow Measure Me stick so we can keep track of Zoey's growth no matter where we live. I am pretty sure he got it for me seeing as how just the other week he mentioned something about a very large package being delivered to his house...