: An Incident at the Plaza :
an excerpt by Elizabeth Kadetsky
She waited for Foster outside the mart on her new corner, one of those dried-mushroom and cephalopod stalls so abundant here in Chinatown. Frogs and eels slithered one atop the other in the murky waters of several rubber vats. A frog splashed out of one only to be grasped mid-leap by the fishmonger and replaced in its aquarium. The man looked in the tub and said something in Chinese, apparently to the frog, his speech punctuated and yet slurred, sharp and yet soft.
Later, she would be able to mark the beginning of her strange sensation as exactly then, the moment of the frog outside its rubber pool. She identified with the frog, that was a first sign. How piercing the air must have felt, a hot blade on exposed organs. The amphibians looked like inside-out things—the frogs gall bladders with legs, the eels intestines, skinless and vulnerable. Only a mother could love them, a mother or Maria.
From that instant forward she felt a need become palpable. She needed a child, needed one like a lost child at a fair needed a mother. If another toddler crossed her path, she’d burst with equal parts grief and love. An imaginary infant had taken a place in her imaginary embrace, along with a sneaking fear she would never behold this child, imagined and yet immanent, so real as to practically exist.
