Artolle was in Vissigny to meet a man about eggplant futures and fertilizer subsidies. He wore green trousers and carried his best umbrella. Having several hours free before his meeting, he strolled into the park, planning to smoke a cigar while reading the sporting news, assuming the rain would hold off until evening. He chose a bench from those ringing the pond, where boys waged war with paper boats and pretended the carp were submarines. Old married couples moved like storks along the white-chipped paths. An ice cream vendor called out flavors, only some of which sounded familiar. A mechanical cat stalked a mechanical rat in the bushes. A full-blooded thrush sang in a sycamore, commentary perhaps on the skirmishes below.

A woman sat down on the far end of the bench. After a few minutes had passed she said, “May I ask you something?” 

“Of course,” said Artolle, discomfited but intrigued.

“If you were granted three wishes,” she said. “What would they be?”

Artolle tapped his shoes together to reassure himself that he was not standing with one foot in a boat.

“I confess,” he lied, “I have never thought about that.”

“Really?”

“Besides, it is utterly absurd, your question.”

“Yet it fascinates you.”

“I don't know you,” he said with a wave of his cigar. “Why are you asking me such things?”

“You don't need to know me to have your wishes granted,” she said with a smile so rapid that Artolle could not be sure he had actually seen it.  

“Strangers don't just offer wishes to strangers,” said Artolle, a note of doubt in his voice despite himself. “Who put you up to this? That rascally Joubert?”

“Never heard of him,” she said.

The rat in the bushes gave a metallic squeal.

“An independent prankster, is it?” said Artolle. “Or merely a lunatic? I must leave in any case.  Good day to you.”

As Artolle got up, the woman said, “You've always wondered who your real mother was.”

Artolle stopped so quickly that the ash from his cigar scattered across his trousers.

“How could you know such a thing?”

The woman shrugged. “Because she sent me.”

Artolle dropped back down onto the bench. The thrush sang on, uncaring. An iridescent bottle-green wasp flew by with a paralyzed spider in its grip.

“Go on,” said Artolle.

“Is that your first wish?” she said, adjusting her hat (Artolle did not recall her wearing a hat, but there it was now, sitting at a jaunty angle). “I suggest you try to be more specific.”

“No, no,” said Artolle. “I wish … my first wish … I want to know her name.”

She uttered a name in a language unknown to Artolle.

“What sort of name is that?” Artolle waved his cigar about for lack of any bolder assertions. 

“Incomprehensible. I can't pronounce it.”

The boys playing at the pond knew the name from the stories their parents would tell them to make them behave. The ice-cream vendor knew the name from his distant homeland; he flinched and made to pack up early.

The woman smoothed the hair where her hat had been.

“Ecoutez-moi. She made sure you would lead a sheltered life,” she said. “So far removed that you would not even know her name in its generality.”

“Are you some kind of magician?” said Artolle, gripping his umbrella like a sword. “Have you drugged me somehow?”

“Is this your second wish, to know more about me?”

“No,” said Artolle. “No, I need to get a grip here. Wishes, I know about this from films and fairy tales. ‘Don't ask for immortality, or you could spend eternity in prison.’ You won't trick me, whatever you are. ‘Don't ask for limitless wealth, or you'll be sent to a world with nothing to buy.’ I am a businessman, I understand these things.”

The woman smiled and waited. Windup squirrels wrestled with their fleshy counterparts over acorns on the lawn. The mechanical cat emerged from the bushes, shaking grease and gears from its claws. 

“Alright,” said Artolle. “My second wish, then. I want to know how my real mother met my father.”

One of the old couples hastened by, throwing anxious looks over their shoulders.

“Therein lies a tale,” said the woman through the lace veil that now adorned her face. “As they say in the pulps. Truth is that your mother never met your father.”

“But that's imposs—” said Artolle, throwing his cigar to the ground.

“Calmez-vous,” said the woman. “Really, you are as rash as your mother. The point I was getting to, really the most important point, is that your mother had no need of your father. Or any man, for that matter.”

Six pigeons performed acrobatics on the lawn, choreographed to the rhythm of the woman's speech.

“I really must go,” said Artolle. “This is preposterous. You are insane.”

“You're her offspring, whether you choose to believe it or not,” said the woman, whose hair now looked more like feathers or dragon down.“Parthenogenetic embrace, self-replicating machineries, apomixis of the sturdy little mandrake. Quite common, the norm really, where we are from.”

Artolle tried to stand up but found he could not. The thrush was singing, the wasp thrumming.

“You tax credulity,” he said, straining to hold on to his umbrella, which now felt rubbery or like a sheaf of roots.

“I think that she kept you a bit too secluded,” said the woman, making a note with one fingernail etching the letters on her other palm. “Your metamorphosis is much more laborious than they tend to be.”

Artolle tried to think of eggplant futures and the regulations about fertilizer, but only phantoms came to his mind. His umbrella had planted itself, ribs opening into stalks, stalks into umbels of flowers.

“My third wish, do I get my third wish?”

“Bien sûr,” said the woman, who was no longer veiled, but was wearing a helmet like Minerva. 

“I wish to wake up!”

“Oh, mon cher, that's a wish I cannot grant.”

“Why not?”

One of the pigeons exploded.

“Because you are not asleep.”

Artolle felt his shoes expanding.

“I don't …” he whispered.

“More a larval state,” she said, fanning herself with her wings. “Tucked up snug in this coin mémoire, a fold and nook in Mother’s memory. Time now to molt and return to the surface castellations of Her brain.”

An egg cracking open in his mind, Artolle began to grasp what was happening.

“Vite, vite, allons-y,” said the woman, now three meters tall and growing. “Your univers de poche collapses, come quickly.”

The pond was swirling, taking the carp down the drain. The boys with their boats were

running for the gates of the park, which receded into blue haze. The trees went up in cold smoke.

Artolle was about to be reunited, a drop of new wine in an ancient bottle. He was no longer he. They understood as the chick understands at the breaking of their shell.

“Je pige,” they said.  “May I keep my green trousers, as a memento, memory within a memory?”

The woman laughed, as she pierced the ceiling of the clouds.

“I think that might qualify as a fourth wish, but in this case you are likely to allow it!”

With trousers still on, Artolle followed the woman through the hole in the sky and recognized in a flash the infinity before them.