The words never come simply to her, never just arrive the way milk bottles shiver down the shoots in old factory footage, each lid smacked on with a popping sound. They aren’t just ready; they aren’t just there.

She works around them. Perambulates. Circumlocutes. She asks her mother to pass the steel wedge. Her sister looks like a nose-face with whiskers. Please, can I have the grains in the holder?

In school, the numbers pair themselves off: the 4 links arms with the 8; the plateau of the long-division table separates the bawling 2 from its mother—the stolid 6. She always knows which should go with which. It seems she was meant to move these figures on the page, always knew how they should work. Line after line. And they are perfect.

She reads, too, and there is no word ajar, no broken tooth in the sentence, no shop window with its lights turned out. They all seem to fit where they should.

But when she writes, the pen stutters in her fingers, refusing to give up the word, just as her tongue clings to the bottom of her mouth and will not budge. Worse, even, than speech. Triangle closet dangler. Animal skin shoes. These all look wrong, like monsters rampaging through the ink in swirls and curls of extra fluff, of too much.

And so, on spelling day, she must endure the humiliation and stand before the class, groping for letters that have hidden themselves, that blink from time to time beneath the shadow of another word, but are never clear.

M-Y-S-E-L-F, she is meant to say, but the letters duck away, turn themselves into trumpets, or numbers, or swans’ necks: things impossible to speak aloud.

In her own words, she is the child born between others. She is the one with the sandy-sprouting skull, pink-shelled fingertips, snowflake collars. The lacings of her other feet come loose. She rides a bandy-wheel and counts the glitter in the sky.

Pity that she cannot bend these things to letter form; knows not yet the shape of metaphor.