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bouquet that Elvira never received. It’s a lush, photogenic spot lined with small pebbles, lots of shade, and gray-green lichens. When the rains come and conditions are just right, perhaps an amanita will surface—ghost in a veil, destroying angel, “its whole career,” as Dickinson observed, “shorter than a snake’s delay.”

PERFECT
Flower
    Having both stamens and carpels,
present and functional.
    I saw a photograph of the pregnant man. He’d (she’d) undergone testosterone treatments, shaved off his long black hair, grown a sketchy mustache and beard, but somehow left his (her) uterus intact. He and his female partner appeared on
Oprah
and in the pages of
People
magazine. Their child was due in a few months, though the couple would not be feeding the baby in the natural way. The photo clearly revealed a pair of lateral sickle-moon scars where his breasts had been surgically removed. Transgender groups everywhere were not pleased, said the public was not prepared for so radical a sight. There would be a casting of stones, and who knows what else.
    A perfect flower in botanical terms is bisexual, a hermaphrodite. The female sexual parts include eggs, ovary, and style. Most resemble a suction bulb, with large swelling at the base, a stalk, and a froth of pollen-hungry styles at the tip. The maleparts look like tiny reflex hammers and consist of anther (tip) and filament (stalk). A lily in the wild is an ideal, a beautifully structured thing, even more so when viewed under a magnifying glass.
    The man is to flower as gossip is to teach.

The Changeling
    Â 
    Beckie was born in 1960, unplanned, the last in a string of five daughters. As an infant she was sweet, sleepy, and undemanding. The family was smitten; mother nursed, nuzzled, petted her new baby, and her sisters happily accepted a warm and pliant version of their stiff plastic dolls. At seven, I was the eldest and most eager for attention; I fought to hold her, twisting toward my father’s Rolleiflex. Photographs from Beckie’s early years show an adorable, fluffy-haired child, four girls bent protectively around her. The crib was pulled out of storage and reassembled, baby clothes reclaimed from the dollhouse. Plenty of love to go around.
    Not until six months did our parents admit something was wrong. Baby books are filled with penciled milestones. Beckie’s was virtually blank. No enchanted gaze following a red teething ring, no head held up decisively, no rolling over, no sitting, no creeping. Finally, they sought help.
    Physicians at Johns Hopkins University sketched a dismal picture: The child was born microcephalic, profoundly retarded with traces of cerebral palsy. Like the bound foot of a Chinese princess, her brain was in a tiny box and could advance only so far. Developmentally, she’d never be older than ten or eleven months, if that—a baby before it learns to feed itself, walk, speak, use the toilet. They advised institutionalization.My parents shot back:
Impossible
. And so, with doctors, friends, and relatives shaking their heads in collective disbelief, we began life with our healthy-daughter-sister-imposter, our changeling.
    It helped that she was sweet, with radish cheeks. Mother effortlessly lifted her from bath to changing table to crib. At three, she could have been an off-the-charts baby, big for her age—that was all. A halo of dark brown curls gave the impression her skull was normal in size, and as for her eyes, sailing about, guttering near her nose, everyone knew someone with a wandering eye. She never cried, even when we lifted her smocked sundress and found a purple knitting needle puncturing one thigh. This little girl was no mistake, no accident. She grinned easily, and the milkman, postman, and all kinds of strangers made pleasant chirping noises at the sight of her.
    Tenderness and light: Mother in blue jeans and poor-boy sweater gliding between sink and high chair where