All Kinds of Fur

When we met, it was in a forest: magical, enchanted, smooth-barked trees hanging low like drooping lowercase letters. Unicorns, birdsong, lily pads, music fluting from hidden corners. It was just before Christmas in one of those miniature playgrounds inside the mall. The toddler I was babysitting drooled on her bib as I picked at the rubber flooring and the man next to me asked me if I was the nanny or the mom. 
The man and I walked around the food court three times together, pushing the baby in her stroller. On our first loop, a woman in a gold tracksuit, face taut with eternal youth, nodded her approval. On our second loop, a woman backlit by the starred ceiling of the mall’s movie theater blessed our coupling, bestowing on us coupons for the frozen yogurt place. The man held my hand by the third loop, but this time we were met by an unsmiling crone wearing head-to-toe fur. A belligerent musk rose from her coat, which was unrecognizable as a single animal but instead dozens, maybe hundreds of hides patched together. 
“You’re giving away your youth,” the crone said. She had my dead mother’s voice. 
How I laughed at her then, to show how little I cared!
It was a small town, and all the men were some version of my father. I married my prince and fell into a sleep for three years, and when I woke up, I was dreaming. After all, what is a dream but a pattern, repeating itself until you can recognize it? Now I was taking care of my baby instead of someone else’s. I scrubbed my man’s house every day until my mind was wiped clean, but sometimes he would take me out, and then I would put on my dress of gold, my dress of silver, my dress of stars. Their seams were too tight now, and I had to coax them on with safety pins and elastic. They belonged to someone who was no longer me. 
At night, I made my family a soup seasoned with the tips of my fingers and pinches of my prospects. I had spent hardly any time as a woman and already I was turning into a creature, my body lumpish, a down covering my entirety. There was no part of me that hadn’t degraded, but my husband made use of me just the same. I went soft everywhere but my heart. 
And then one day my baby was grown. I had whittled my fingers down to the bone, put the marrow of me in her soup, and she—she had the luster of youth. I begrudged her gleam. I wanted her to grow stronger, and I wanted her to suffer. There was no easy way to explain my rough, scalloped feelings for that pearl. I wanted to protect and confine her. 
But my daughter refused my offerings, snuck out to the mall any time our backs were turned. How little she cared! She was running away from me, away from my husband—sad sack of bawdy impotence—from our town, but it was illusory. She was in a funhouse, and the boys she thought were exits were the ever tightening center of the maze. My daughter would one day find herself looking into a distorted mirror and see me.
The neighborhood animals—the raccoons, opossums, squirrels, coyotes, stray dogs and cats—came to my door. They had smelled my desperation; they understood how cycles worked. Each gave me a piece of their fur. I made myself a suit from the fur, so wide and long it engulfed me, formed an impervious layer between my body and the outside world. How long I had resisted nature; how little I might care in my disguise. I returned to the slumping mall. 
The woman in gold was still there, but she had aged, the stitches of her face pulled too tight, the false gold tarnished to green. I sat at the edge of the children’s playground amongst the plexiglass stumps and waited: for my daughter, for my unrecoverable youth, for the inextricable pieces of me—slowly rotting but still alive, pulsing beneath that stinking coat.