I met a girl once, not older than nine or ten. She was wearing a little white dress with scarlet begonias running across the hem of her waist. She told me of her plan, the one she wrote up on the corner of Jefferson Street on a used paper napkin. It was brown, she said, as if having it been brown was of some sort of significance. On it she wrote her fate. Her plan was to find a raccoon, one much too wild to be sane. Once she found this rabid raccoon she would provoke it, make it agitated. Agitated enough to bite her. She wanted to acquire the rabies virus. She wanted it to course through her nervous system, advancing its way to her brain, slowly making her mad. Crazy mad, not angry mad, I asked her to clarify this for me. When I interrogated her more, eager to know why she wanted this she simply said, “I want to be like mommy.” Before I could stop her, she walked away and jumped on a bus, weak and wobbly.

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      A week later, I was watching the news when I heard of the death of a girl. The girl with scarlet begonias and a wish for insanity.