This is how you use the magic medicine, she says. The new plastic bottle of amber liquid, covered from top to bottom with a white label full of black print. Now is a good time. There's a full moon in Czechoslovakia, so the time is right. I'll have to buy a little book that lists the positions of the planets throughout the year, so I will be able to know what times to choose to employ the medicine. She didn't even need to refer to a book.

You put this in your mouth. My tongue senses slippery and hard, two parts held together by delicate cord, one larger than the other, a solid but raw organ of some small animal. I'm embarrassed to have dead animal in my mouth, and I feel ashamed to have given up being vegan so easily. And you need to swallow it next to your address. Does she mean on the steps in front of where I live. Where is that. An apartment building with names typed in black on white paper next to an old-fashioned buzzer system with black buttons? Maybe if I write out my address and lie down near the paper. It's tough holding it in my mouth. I want to swallow. Do I wash it down with the liquid in the bottle. Oh, one half went down my throat. Salivating with the effort of not swallowing the larger part.

Do you feel that? she asks me. Her facial expression directs my attention behind me. I turn, still seated in the chair at the table I share with her, and see that the other woman is giving birth. Her question meant did I feel the glowing energy that she is able to sense radiating from the birth. I can't feel the energy the way she does, and it occurs to me that I could lie, oh sure I feel it, but I decide to simply not answer. Two men stand over the woman giving birth on the sofa, a father and brother. She makes the sounds of giving birth, but the pain doesn't sound as extreme as it usually is. After a few pushes, she makes a larger sound and her head arches back, her face contorted more in pleasure than in pain.

She's had the baby. That last push moved it out of her. She stands up from the sofa, smiling, and her blue granny dress covers her. There's no sign that she's just had a birth experience. Wow, I say to the woman who's giving me the medicine, how are you gonna top that? Because she's pregnant, too, and will give birth soon. And she will naturally feel the need to compete with the speed and ease of the birth we've just witnessed.

First Wrathful She-Khan and then Sonreído enter and stand near the table. WSK tells me that Sonreído has finished his opus. I'm moved and pleased. I look at his smiling, relieved face and think of his thirty hours a week of work and his twenty hours a week of refining the magical, transformative elements of his creation, and try to formulate something to say to him about how amazing it must be for him to have the fruits of his dedication, how hard he worked.

Then we're outside, walking on the grass near the cliff down to the water, and I'm explaining to WSK how to take the medicine with your address. Do I have some paper and a pen so that we can write down her address.