Instead of a smile or frown, a movie fragment of night sky washes across her face.

 

 A galaxy of stars and moons.

 

 Her lips red with beet juice. Her eyelids smeared with yellow saffron dust.

 

 There, a shifting mask of pink nebulas. Of planets with rings and craters.

 

 

 Mother Nature says, “They ask for too many letters of reference.”

 

 Plus a polygraph test. Four pieces of picture ID.

 

 “Four,” Mother Nature says, holding up the hennaed fingers of one hand. Her

 

 bracelets of brass wire and dirty silver, rattling windchimes around her wrist.

 

 She says, “Nobody has four pieces ofpicture ID . . .”

 

 To become a nun, she says, you have to take a sit-down test, worse than

 

 the SATs and the LSATs, put together. And full of story problems, such as:

 

 “How many angelscandance on the head of a pin?”

 

 All of this, Mother Nature says, just to find out:

 

 “If you’re marrying Christ on the rebound.”

 

 

 Her long hair pulled away from her face, braided and falling down her back,

 

 Mother Nature says,

 

 “Of course, I failed. Not just the drug test—I failed everything.”

 

 Not just as a nun, but throughout most of her life . . .

 

 She shrugs, her freckled shoulders under the tie-dyed straps,

 

 “So here I am.”

 

 

 The constellations shifting and crawling across her face, Mother Nature says,

 

 “I still needed someplace to hide.”

 

  

 

 Foot Work

 

 A Story by Mother Nature

 

 Don’t laugh, but in aromatherapy, they warn you never to light a lemon-cinnamon candle at the same time you light a clove candle and a cedar-nutmeg candle. They just don’t tell you why . . .

 

 In feng shui, they never let on, but just by putting a bed in the wrong spot, you can focus enough chi to kill a person. You can give a late-term abortion with just acupuncture. You can use crystals or aura work to give people skin cancer.

 

 Don’t laugh, but there are back-alley ways you can turn anything New Age into a killing tool.

 

 Your last week in massage school, they teach you never to work the transverse reflex zone at the heel of the foot. Never touch the arch of the left-foot dorsum. And especially not the outer-left-most aspect. But they don’t tell you how come. This is the difference between therapists who work the light side versus the dark side of the industry.

 

 You go to school to study reflexology. It’s the science of manipulating the human foot to heal or stimulate certain parts of the body. It’s based on the idea that your body is divided into ten different energy meridians. Your big toe, for example, it’s connected straight to your head. To cure dandruff, you massage the little spot just behind your big toenail. To cure a sore throat, you massage the middle joint of the big toe. This isn’t the kind of health care covered by any insurance plan. This is like being a doctor but without the income. The kind of people who want the space between each toe rubbed to cure brain cancer, they don’t tend to have loads of money. Don’t laugh, but even with years of experience manipulating people’s feet, you’ll still find yourself poor and rubbing the feet of people who never made income their top priority.

 

 Don’t laugh, but one day you see a girl you went to massage school with. This girl, she’s your same age. You both wore beads together. You two braided dried sage and burned it to cleanse your energy field. The two of you were tie-dyed and barefoot and young enough to feel noble while you rubbed the feet of dirty homeless people who came into the school’s free practice clinic.

 

 That was years and years ago.

 

 You, you’re still poor. Your hair has started to break off at the scalp. From poor diet or gravity, people think you’re frowning even when you’re not.

 

 This girl you went to school with, you see her coming out of a posh midtown hotel, the doorman holding the door open as she sweeps out swinging furs and wearing high heels that no reflexologist would ever strap her feet inside.

 

 While the doorman is flagging her a cab, you go close enough to say, “Lentil?”

 

 The woman turns, and it’s her. Real diamonds sparkle at her throat. Her long hair shines, thick, heaving in waves of red and brown. The air around her smells soft as roses and lilac. Her fur coat. Her hands in leather gloves, the leather smooth and pale and nicer than the skin on your own face. The woman turns and lifts her sunglasses to rest on the crown of her hair. She looks at you and says, “Do I know you?”

 

 You went to school together. When you were young—younger.

 

 The doorman holds the cab’s door open.

 

 And the woman says, of course she remembers. She looks at a wristwatch, blinding bright with diamonds in the afternoon sun, and says in twenty minutes she needs to be across town. She asks, can you ride along?

 

 The two of you get into the back of the cab, and the woman hands the doorman a twenty-dollar bill. He touches his cap, and says it’s always such a pleasure to see her.

 

 The woman tells the cabdriver the next address, some place a little farther uptown, and the cab swings into traffic.

 

 Don’t laugh, but this woman—Lentil, your old friend—she loops one fur-coat arm out of the handle of her purse, she snaps the purse open, and inside is stuffed nothing but cash money. Layers of fifty- and hundred-dollar bills. With a gloved hand, she digs into these and finds a cell phone.

 

 To you, she says, “This won’t take a minute.”

 

 Next to her, your Indian-printed cotton wrap skirt, your flip-flop sandals and brass-bell necklace don’t look chic and ethnic anymore. The kohl around your eyes and the faded henna designs on the back of your hands, they make you look like you never take a bath. Next to her diamond-stud earrings, your favorite dangling silver earrings could be thrift-store Christmas-tree ornaments.