But there was your bracelet still looped around your wrist, so I knew it was you.

Your hair was full of ants and mites. Two abandoned bird nests. The gardener cleaned and clipped you into a pleasantly unobtrusive sphere, and I wept while staring at a photograph taken when your locks were last springy, golden, and smooth.

The gold is starting to show again, but in places it’s orange and red. Most likely layers of dye you used to keep us from finding you.

It’s been so long, now you are old enough to be called Susan. I use this grown-up name often to familiarize you with it. You took your backpack and disappeared one night, then spent six years in the wild without a name, and now you’re so far removed from the memory of even having a name that you only sometimes respond to Suzy—with a subtle rustle of your hair—and still never to Susan. You will learn with time.

You’ve grown too big to enter the house and sleep in your own bed, and you still refuse to dine with your father and myself. You prefer to sit silent in the yard and take only water and sunlight. I’m having the cook make your favorite Baked Alaska for your birthday this weekend, which I suspect will bring an end to this rebellious teenage hunger strike nonsense.

I’m pleased you conceded to wear the mauve dress tonight, after I made the proper adjustments, and the maid and your father helped me wrap and sew it onto your body—with no help from you. Despite constant washing up, your sap stuck and crusted through the dress in places. Your hardened skin ripped it at the collar as well as down the left side. But tonight I observe proudly that the extra seams are hardly noticeable from anywhere beyond the fifth row.

Despite your atrocious posture, you didn’t fit into the auditorium. All the money your father and I donated to have it built for the academy when you were little—if we’d only known the dimensions wouldn’t allow for our own daughter to stand onstage! It took much arm-twisting to get them to cut the ceiling and lower you through the roof, but money solves all problems, and it is our auditorium, after all. It even bears our name.

The rafters block the hole from view. The room is colder, but everyone has solved that problem for themselves by keeping their coats on.

The orchestra’s playing would help us forget the cold entirely, if it weren’t for the booming dissonance of your notes.

You refused to play your clarinet. I’m unsure whether it’s out of rebelliousness, or the fact that your current state makes holding the clarinet very difficult for you. The handyman drilled down through your trunk, split into several interconnected tunnels, and with the addition of some strategically-placed holes and a gust of wind, you can play again.

But there is an overdramatic, morose quality to your playing, Susan, that I hope will disappear over time. The rest of your classmates are currently attempting a sunny rendition of Tchaikovsky’s Russian Dance, muddied by your petulant bassooning in the background.

That ceaseless howling keeps the audience from knowing when one piece has ended and another begins.

And it’s much too loud. You still haven’t learned to blend, balance, and order yourself with everyone else. I see that six years in the woods only encouraged this ugly showboat behavior. Beyond the reach of civilization, everything is competition and chaos.

Your father and I have seen to it that you never have to compete, but you must learn to conduct yourself respectably if you are to go on to university and make something of yourself.

Your falling leaves litter the stage and distract the other players. Hold them from chattering, Susan, so desperate for applause that you have to provide it yourself throughout the performance.

Now swaying and creaking, such a restless child! I told your father not to unfasten you, but administration complained that the crane took too much space in the parking lot. Let people park in the street! Don’t they see how your unbridled fidgeting is ruining the performance? Keep her restrained, I told them, she’s still too wild, I told them.

Cracking and a boom, and the whole auditorium goes black.

Thumping of seats, shoving. No more music except for yours, Susan—ugly notes, groans, and that self-serving applause.

I put my hands on your father’s back and follow him out of our row and down the aisle, other feet stepping on my toes, screams in the dark.

In the whipping wind of the parking lot we see that the blackout covers the entire street, possibly beyond.

The top of your head sways against the moon, and you’re fingering a power line.

Headlights flash and swerve, horns honk, the whole parking lot is a jam of cars and milling, panicked people. Scrape of metal and crunch of plastic. Shouts.

Congratulations, Susan. You’ve thrown your biggest tantrum yet and ruined another evening. I hope you’re pleased with yourself.

The voice muffled through the glass took the form of a small insect with an ugly, irregular buzz. He swatted at the sound in his mind, and it was gone.

Back to exploring the sphere’s familiar yet ever-changing interior. When he first entered it, he was aware of its earthly construction—a stained-glass orb two meters in diameter, islands of transparent color arcing overhead like a frozen wave, curving under his naked back to cradle him like the shell of an egg, embossed everywhere between the islands with beveled rivers of lead came, above like thick spiderweb, pressing against his skin from below like veins of hardened blood. In the beginning, it hurt his feet to stand on those irregular ridges. They left marks.

“Rise.”

Swat. Even in his physical body, his hand twitched.

The hand’s movement caught his attention and he stared at it, across the landscape of his reclined body, hills valleys and plains of skin dyed unreal in the light. He relaxed his eyes, and his hand resting on his chest became a cave, a place of uniform darkness for a very small someone to hide.

“Rise!”

He imagined he’d caught the voice insect beneath his hand, and he flattened it against his ribcage, ground it down.

Despite this violence, it buzzed again, and for longer. “You must move your bowels, or you will experience great pain.”

A lie. Since he drank from the tube the day before (which to him felt like weeks ago), he had felt full, satisfied, his boat had finally pushed away from the dock and now drifted where there was only a sea of bleeding color, a patchwork sky of crystalline ozone, and the curve of the horizon. The earth had reached up around him, turned inside out like a sock. He became its molten core boiling with fleshy magma that was red, blue, yellow, pink, orange, purple, and green. His temperature was consistent, the humid air of his breath and sweat vapor beading and running on the glass. The stink of his caverns’ methane expulsions lingering, diluting, reabsorbed and filtered through the porous loam of his body. He had entered as a human being with all he needed, and now after however much time—months? decades?—had achieved equilibrium.

He assembled his words carefully and burped them into the shell, “Don’t open,” he said. “I have nothing to give you.”

“You may see it that way,” buzzed the insect, which entered his vision as a shape the size of a man behind the glass. “But while you have nothing to give, there is something we must take. You’ll burst.”

He stood. “I am not a man! I am a planet! I am geology!”

The shape leaned closer, and its face assembled from jigsaw fragments that didn’t interlock so much as settle next to each other—a mouth of teeth through a pane of yellow, one eye through red, the other eye through purple so dark he only saw the white.

Behind the man-shape were other orbs. Perspective layered them in such a way that their transparent centers overlapped into muddy dark. Forms moved in them like festering pupae.

The man-shape reached for the hatch.

He lunged backward, hitting the wall with such force that the sphere bumped loose and rolled onto the floor. The roll caused him to fall, which caused the sphere to roll further, and he realized his planet had been flung from its orbit and was free to explore further reaches, pulled not by the gravity of a larger body, but propelled by the will of his own churning core.

On all fours he rolled his planet past rows of other occupied spheres. Spotlights in the ceiling shone perpetual explosions of colored light in his eyes. A bright void opened before him, and the revolving floor of his sphere dropped out from beneath him.

It still contained him. But he could stretch himself weightlessly and press his fingers and toes against its single curved wall.

He guessed the sphere was still turning because the light kept changing across the skin of his arms, legs, and chest.

He clawed at the lead ridges to spin the sphere faster. Its panes flashed by, as if soaring over a brilliant map of alien land, the lead rivers smeared silver across his vision.

The man-shape’s voice boomed clear in his head.

“Rise!”