First Sentence

"Recovering, my hand peels translucent flags, tags of rice paper; wherever the magnet pulls the compass is true north, a particular unraveling: 1969, the television flickering its aquariumed astronaut cradled in static as we first-grade girls poured glue into our hands, opaque pools slowly abandoning layers of the visible for leavings of rubbery crystal, milk drained away with the pits of marriage-, career-, life-lines, all the scars of predestination flush as the screen-a mother's loving hand on the sheet-smoothing the moon's craters."