The Bagels of Wisdom

by Kat Beyer

Old Lady Think can flip dark to light and light to dark like a pancake. She lives out beyond the Milky Way, which the Dineh think is made up of the footprints of the dead. (They’re right on this one, but they’re not in this story.)

She’s got a bunch of names, more names than Allah, and—no offense, new gods—she’s far older. Used to sit around in the caves with us, looking pretty overweight and extremely pleased with herself. Now she appears in many forms, sometimes as a mysterious 2 a.m. call on your cell phone, or a bagel you did not order.

Such a bagel appeared on Nora McPherson’s plate during her lunch hour in the East Village. She’d stopped in to ignore some dancers she used to know before she moved uptown and went to work for Wall Street. (Mind you, think about all the dancers Wall Street funds.)

Ms. McPherson took a bite anyway, after the cranky waitress wouldn’t take it back, neither of them suspecting that the waitress held the pose of the ancient High Priestess of Tiamat as she did this. By the end of lunch Ms. McPherson was drafting her two weeks notice; by the end of dinner she was drunkenly apologizing over the phone to a friend from Juilliard, and at 9 a.m. the next morning she had an audition.

Back behind the Milky Way, Old Lady Think just smiled. Making mountains is fun, but sometimes, it’s the little things, like sending visionary bagels to the monkey children.