Nana always said getting by meant knowing when to leave pieces of yourself behind and how to replace them with other things, so she kept soil in tiny glass jars. In a text chain my cousins fought over the dirt.

When I emptied the first jar into the bathtub it offered only floating dust but the second held gunpowder. The third unraveled chicken wire; the fourth coughed out saliva, assorted soaps, and two weeks of dirty laundry. The fifth sprouted a root system and a braid of hair tied around a memory of a kitchen, mid-century Brooklyn and the smell of marinara. It must have been a Sunday. The sixth jar yielded a shy shadow that clung to the glass; I shook it free and it landed hard, scattering a wreck in the tub.

From the seventh through fourteenth jars fell songs in minor keys and when I opened arctic circle a mammoth pushed from the neck of the teacake glass. It had to back out. Because of its tusks. It settled on the bed forming in the tub and its eyes, like fog or windows behind lace curtains, waited kindly upon me. myrtle beach gave me crabs and I itched my way through new orleans powdered sugar, a factory worker, slag, and so many cheap plastic beads. I gave the mammoth the beads and it chewed them; its eyes rusted clean.

From other jars came diamonds and pearls and then dancers, women in sundresses and women in thongs who played the air from my palm to the tub like a stage, who floated, who made nothing and burrowed, keen, with elbows and teeth, into the mess below.

I kept cliffs of dover to throw into the ocean but sacrificed the seine (toenail clippings and glitter) to the collection. I poured siberia and cape town and sydney and even home. I was growing. I was large. I felt my knuckles and shins soften and expand like rising bread, like the pill dinosaurs that came from casablanca and bloomed toxic blue.

I wore her house on my shoulders and dropped armfuls of jars from massive heights, from nowhere. I blitzed london and cancun and maine and finally I released the boy I knew had been suffocating for so long in bon secour alabama 36511. I held him in my hand, my giant hand. He wore only overalls and nothing underneath. He was missing a tooth. He had polluted hair and rhododendron eyes and I recognized him from his absence in my grandmother’s stories. He must have been nine but that was too old. It would have happened when he was six months, seven, blind to the world and what people owed him.

I knew him and knew that he had a collection of big things that spilled into the yard, disused dressers or bed frames with all their parts because he liked wholes and would turn away when leaves fell from trees in fall. I knew that he detested smallness, fragments, pieces. Neighbors had told him how young she was and which way she had run and he dreamed a secret dream of finding her, of seeing her first in a train station and watching for a minute—just a minute—while she explained to every stranger in a suit or sweats her mistake, how she hadn’t meant it. He loathed heavily and easily and he would never feel the wind but sometimes he would look north. It was big enough for him; direction sweeps wide and cannot be broken.

Once she sat me with the cowslips and made me watch the way cloud shadows fell fluid on the river. So I knew that she loved him and I knew why she left him behind and I knew that now she was dead and died alone. So I dumped him in the tub and turned up the radio and opened the faucet and made mud. So love is the thing that is missing when all the parts fit together. Even with magic I could not recreate you.