I said, baby, hold my beer. Watch mama jack up your car and thread out those lug nuts. You’ve never changed a tire, and I worry about how you will do in life. You said mom, I’m going to get dirty, so I let you watch as I bounced my foot on the tire iron, watching it flex. I haven’t taught you what the world will take. Do you know how to use a saw?

You are going into an autopsy field, and I think I should be showing you what the diamond Dremel bit can do. How you need to hold on to the specialty wrench, the one that only fits that bit. We should be practicing, so when it is time to slice through skin and bone and remove the core of no longer firing synapses, you don’t nick it or cause damage.

I told you as I torqued the star pattern, about the professor, Jeremy Bentham. His death was something else. You laughed and thought I was kidding. I explained his skeleton was dressed in his own clothes and padded with hay and a wax head was made. The real one they tried to preserve looked like a nightmare relic, probably like your favorite brand of pickles. You said, gross mom. But you are me, and I am you. We think the same things are funny. You said I bet it turned green, but you would never want to crack the lid and smell the jar.

What a way to go. Maybe I’ll play a joke at my own funeral. I’ll make a spring system and suddenly sit up in the coffin. I wonder how many people I could actually make cry, popping out of nowhere, like a jack in a box. I remember when I was the age of possibilities, the unknowing. Now my back hurts, I am a packhorse donkey. An ass who learned not enough useful things to give to you.

I want to make your mouth a screwdriver and the claw end of the hammer, removing the nails of a man’s staples. What happens, if I don’t tap it into your arms how to be a box cutter, cutting through every cardboard corner.

There is so little time to teach you about the wild. I still have to show you how to grin, for the world. How to make it obey, how to remove it from its axis and bounce it the July street. Slap it, balance it, make it only spin for you. I will tell you how to put your foot in the boot of Italy, how to wear the world and bend it to your will.

I think about the professor’s head in the jar, at least once a day, drowning in the brine, shrunken eyes contained, half as much as I think about teaching you power tools. If I could make crescent wrenches of my hands, I would give them to you and a Snap-On ribcage of red, with perfectly oiled drawers.

I watch your hands behind your back smirking, while I tell you dumb jokes. How beautiful I find your lashes. How you rock back on your heels. I find I counterbalance and tip forward. That we are a seesaw, a perfectly balanced scale, an old lion and a prideful cub. I am a watch the hands at nine o’clock, the hoop curve of that nine is the smoothness of your face.

I am the canary in the well, smelling for gas. Indiana Jones testing every booby trap. I have found the quicksand, and I will make a rope of my hair, I will lay down for you. You will walk across my back. I will ask you to leave me behind, once you can forage in that wild.