A Field Guide to Letters & Punctuation

The world is large, and I am but a small thing, warm when compared to other things, ice, parked cars, blossoming trees. Yet dogs are warmer, as is lava. Newly made tea is warmer, as is fire. I am born small and soft, a blank slate in a state of astonishment, I am born susceptible and soon held against the astonishing warmth of my mother. My plum-sized mind, paper folding into some kind of origami, a bird, a boat, or one of those fortune-telling things you open and close as your friends choose numbers and colours. C’mere, it says. I’ve a few things to tell you about what happens next.