Gold shells tumbling

In a holiday town slicked in sunlight, through straggling scrub by scruffy tennis courts near the sea, we hunted for Narnia. Crouching down in wet togs, wearing towels as shawls, we found instead a thin, frightened, wild mother, her spine dragon-arched with starvation and anger. Her litter mewed in high peeps, as if crying in bird-tongue. Perhaps they were like those human children people say remember past lives, eerie in their precision. (A child sees military boots marching; hears a shot; glimpses upside-down trees through water; watches, but cannot reach, a mother’s outstretched hands.)

Though we’d shared disturbing dreams like these, my