The month, the year, August 2007. I'm on a bus to see my grandmother's urn in Xianning–the City of Osmanthus. The driver is a lunatic. He careens the double-decker of women & babies past every moving object on the paved path. Twice we almost slam into oxen, their necks tied to trees, their snouts igniting fear.

The lady next to me grips my arm as she retches into a plastic bag. The stench reminds me of the mucus in my throat in sleeplessness – like last night, when I recognized my own dread, stomach lapping like the Dead Sea. My mother is motherless. I will be motherless. We'll all be motherless, and when we become mothers our children will be motherless, so there is logic, a pattern to this panic, of course.

I forget about the distance, wish my grandmother were beside me, throwing up so I could rub her back. Then I imagine this woman next to me as my grandmother. Her hands still clutch at me, quivering, slippery & cold. She wears a paisley dress & a rope of peppercorn hair dangles over her chest. I imagine her hair buffeting in the hot August wind. I imagine catching butterflies with a net made of her hair.

But I cannot touch her. I gently ease her hand off my arm. We speed past glades, verdant paddies, wheelbarrows, more oxen, hundreds of oxen, mountains of oxen. The driver is daydreaming: we, this bus, a kaleidoscope of panic, careening, spinning onto the dust, dispersing thousands of chickens, sneezing clouds of feathers. My mother is motherless. I will be motherless. We'll all be motherless, and when we become mothers our children will be motherless, so there is logic, a pattern to this panic, of course.