Ghada Amer

The journey was long, arduous and by the time she arrived at the state of Maine, her costume had fused to her flesh. She had a dressmaker split the center seam, separating her so she could walk, and went through life with her legs covered in thick green scales, a brocade, fossilized by the sea into leathery chaps like a cowboy would wear. Men found her scales incredibly attractive; it was considered good luck to rub her thighs. They all wanted only one thing, to get into the space between the scales, the alligator purse that had been perfectly protected. The sweat of their palms stung her skin; she found them repulsive. 

She moved to Massachusetts and took a part time job doing women's work sewing tassles on loafers in a shoe factory.

Suck cock, suck cock, the sound of the sewing machine.

At a country circus, she met Rae, a boy with powdery hands, like buttery talc, who worked the spinning cups in a traveling show. His mother was a bearded lady, his father the world's tallest man. His beloved uncle Fegee, a merman, who died long ago, was laid out, taxidermied in a glass vitrine that traveled wherever the family went—a quarter a peak.

Rae asked her about her homeland and she told him about the veiled life, she told him there were places she couldn't go, she told him she was invisible there—people only saw what they wanted to see, they didn't look too far. She told him that when she left she knew she would never go back. Her family wept as she sewed herself into her disguise, their tears filled the river that floated her down to the sea—her home was lost to history. As she told Rae the story of her past, her eyes filled and dripped plink, plunk onto uncle Fegee's vitrine. Rae wiped the vitrine and never asked her about it again.

When their daughter was born with her index finger extended—extraordinarily long and sharp with a boney open passage at the top, an eye for thread to pass through, they thought it a plus. They named her Penelope. She could thread herself through fabric, through wood, though metal. She was incredibly good at math, won a scholarship to a prestigious engineering school and took jobs building ships, airplanes, skyscrapers—the master builder of the 20th century. Their son, Morris, had wings under his arms, a transparent flesh webbing from his arms to his ribs. His shirts had to be custom made. A more successful Icarus, he made the first successful shipless solo flight into space—and returned with an incredible tan. He married an ornithologist and they nested on the top floor of a high rise.

Yours is a family of unusual traces, a soothsaying neighbor once said. 

We are bred to survive, the father answered, accidentally clipping the woman with his weed wacker, lacerating her ankles. It is evolution—we keep what we need, we lose the rest.

Morris had an irrational fear of all breeds of infants and so he and his wife lived with their two Labradors, their cockatiel, their frogs and ferrets all adopted at an advanced age. Don't put your pet out to pasture, give it a new life at Elder Animal Haus—was the slogan on their matchbooks.

Penelope, so smart and successful, was lonely. Strolling the seaport, she met a sailor from far away; they married that night and immediately returned to the water. Packing to go, her mother gave her a scrap from long ago, the piece she'd saved from her center seam and the girl affixed it to herself—a scaly merkin mounted with crazy glue.

Tom, takes a taxi to Tasina's house in Harlem, leaving her cock and balls behind, hoping she can hide out for a while. Tasina has a boyfriend who, nostalgic for the ontogenetic past of life in the womb, internalizes the water—he drinks his morning urine. It harkens back to the water of his early life, the amniotic, the oceanic. His habit has prompted many women to leave him. Tasina, just nods, she brings him a glass, Bottoms up, she says, liking the way his penis fills the glass, like a soda syphon Aqua vitae. 

Recovering, Penelope reads that while on it's journey, the rover Opportunity discovered evidence of water on the surface of Mars, and is intrigued at the idea that at some unknown time in the distant past there was life on the red planet. She gets it in her head to do one thing before she dies—with her engineering skills she will build the Bimodal Nuclear Thermal Rocket.

Because of her age, because she is a woman, because of all of history and everything that has come before, she is once again invisible, no one notices the little old lady in Harlem building a space ship at the edge of the Hudson river. Using everything she has, she sews herself a space ship, Neptune, taking off under the cover of night, a bright blast, echoing around the world.