I

I am not the first wonder nor the eighth nor the last, but I am wondrous all the same. For a nickel you can stare at me, at my limbs covered in hair, my large lustrous eyes (my black brilliant eyes). Pools of intelligence, evidence of my wit, windows of my soul—my soul is an almond (an almond with no door). For a nickel, you can see all this, and more.

How old do you suppose I am? A child hanging on the neck of Farini, that Canadian huckster. Fine specimen of a man, throwing himself in the Niagara for the right price. Walking on tightropes like a pink ape. His real name is not Farini. It’s John Jacob Jingleheimer. It’s Johnny Appleseed. It’s John Luther Long. No, I am lying. It’s William. But why be Billy Hunt when you can be The Great Farini?

I call him Father. He calls me Krao.

Krao, he says, we’ll pretend you were missing, and I’ll pretend to find you.

Class, order, family, genus, species. Father is his own species, and I am his family. Humans descend from apes, but I descend from something else. People used to say that a woman who stared too long at the camel robe of St. John the Baptist would give birth to hirsute children, for there is nothing more erotic in this world than a saint who turns you into an animal.

My dead mother never saw a saint. I was a furry forest child wearing a silver bangle. Father is kind, but he paid good coin to catch me. For a nickel, you can learn all this and more. Was willst du sehen? I carry the whole of New York in the pouch of my cheek.

IV

I cannot eat animals that look like me. The furry pigs, the long-haired cows, the lambs, the calves, the goats, the rats. When their fried lard coats the lining of my mouth, I cannot tell where their fat ends and mine begins. I have licked the inside of my palm to know what I taste like but could not distill the taste down to my essence. Do animals know when one of them has been cooked? Can they feel the soul of their species in the steam of the meat?

In nature, nothing is scarier than the predator that eats you. But I have found the act of kissing to be scarier still, the intimate knowledge of someone’s flavor stalking you. Desire is the prelude to famine, and I have spent nights in bed finding a monster not there before. It demands that I eat my fingers, that I pull on them with my lips in search of water. I don’t know where the monster ebbs and where I flow. I cannot separate water from the fruit.

Even if all the hair fell off my body and I emerged like a nymph from a swan skin, I would still be a monster. Mermaids still shatter your bones and harpies chew off your spleen.

In the morning, everything tastes different. I have my breakfast and I go to work. I try to think of a reason to linger at the fair. I eat more dinners than I should, I drink all the wine they can serve. Someone says I should get undressed, but their eyes are too brown and too warm. If I eat enough—if I eat enough—