The Mother of Destruction here i am again, a barren little mother on the break or mend i'm also neither, for

my hands, they wind and wind until a form emerges. What a form. a paid artist, paid by artists, trading small wares for money, actual cash. I make the little forms as I wrap and tie. I start with wire, and end the form in gilded threads. I loop the shapes to make the arms and legs, wind a wire ball atop to form the head, or heads, or no head. No head is an option. Six arms and four legs also an option, as is one-armed and no legged. Anything becomes possible. I form the skeleton for what's to come. This time, the figure has two heads, shared torso, two arms, two legs. Special commission for a comic book artist who is headed toward no future who drinks til vertigo besets and plans to squeeze the Siamese Spider Twin between his sweaty nervous hands, while he struggles with 'sketcher's block'. I have a skeleton. This part is perfect, and I begin the arduous process of making thread stick, and wind it around like bandages in peachy pale hued tones, because he said it would be racist if it were any other skin color than he or I possess. I am porcelain pale. He is trucker's tan blotched pale and cancerous gold. Truthfully, I'd make the baby's skin blue, if it were my decision, to match the whole intensity of my barren, scarred and scraped womb to share without saying what happens when a baby is born unborn, having died of a broken heart. After peach, then black, and back to peach for fingerless mitten hands and toeless bootie feet, the black for onesies, spelling out intention. The peach crochet thread is trash taken from the houses of dead old women, discarded at estate sales. But no one throws away black crochet thread. None is ever to be had at houses of the dead. That is bought, as are the steel wire and silly eyes and this makes up the great majority of the form. The winding is complete once feet are wound and knotted. Back to Intention. That the Siamese Spider Twins are enchanted and maleficent. This terrible burden of hell inside them, planned, by he who commissioned this. Each one has an evil third eye, pale blue and full of hell. Googly eyes never looked more menacing. I glue them on regretting that my handiwork is evil. I make a little web-bed, shaping the form of a spider's creation of wire, and threading it with strands of melted glue. I string some little gossamer strands onto the twins, in someone's imagining, they spin silk themselves. I place them in their evil bassinet, hot glue dobs hold a baby print fleece square

underneath them as a blankie, and a glob of glue holds them to the whole piece. That blankie, It is the striking antithesis of what they are. They are perfect now, in their full and evil form, and I swear this one won't unravel. As I pack them into the box that holds every little one I make, and every supply I use, all bought one by one, their little form, it catches on my exacto knife, unwisely unsheathed, slices a long line through the painstakingly tight-wound threads it cuts them to the bone. or so to speak. Their wire frame protudes from the cut like the bones of an anorexic. My heart tears in half with it. The threads split open, and i try to glue them down, only to find them fraying, coming apart at other ends. In a fit of desperation, rage and tears, i grab one end and try to tie it off, to stop the unravelling of their form, but as i try, it continues. they roll onto the floor and over my third floor balcony, gracefully floating to the ground in a black and peach cascade of thread, some cut like confetti, floating falling independent of the skein unrolling others in one continuous strand. Flipping end on end. Undone, unrolling all the way to the ground. i run after it. i trip over myself in tears, going down the stairs, going down less gracefully than they. When i get to the heap that was my twins, i grieve for it. The only thing left intact is one head. With eyes and thread still spun, just unraveling at the neck. I get my box. sever it with pliers and a razor blade, and secure the stub of unraveling neck with glue. It is all that i have left. I paint the decapitated head red, just at the cut and glue neck. I package the head in a box and write a note. I am the mother of destruction, and no good baby can be born of me right now. I'll make you a new one after I grieve, but here's the proof that I tried, at least, to make what you commissioned. They got cut, fell off my balcony, and died. Call the art police. I have killed them with neglect. The next day i stick the box in my messenger's bag and cycle off to meet my customer. He is pissed as hell and full of questions. i tell him that his twins are dead. i bring forth the box, specially constructed to look like a thumb-sized coffin. wrapped in black velvet. A black ribbon rose atop it. i hand it over. i hang my head. He is staring into the box, and a long silence emerges. He reads the note. Then produces: This is better than I could have dreamed. How morbid.. He has no idea of my turmoil. He couldn't. i tell no one. i am embarrassed at my weakness embarrassed that the babies i make are all dead. He shakes my hand. Wordless. He hands me fifty bucks and a Xanax.