My father’s least favorite prophecy

has been reviewed by five generations of scholars

and soundly dismissed by them all.

When the heir becomes a daughter …

Nonsense, they insist:

smoothing wiry gray beards with

tired hands and frowning

at their crumpled scrolls—

Never, they reassure my father,

            and his father,

and every Presaggio man before him

            who sought them out to be reassured:

that this single condition has not been met

and thus the demise of our family name—

                       and our monopoly on magic—

           could not yet approach.

Instead of realizing that a boy might really be a girl

they propose a mistranslation.

            (A possibility, after all—

            the original draft was written

            in Latin.)

Or else the entire prophecy is deceit

designed to instill fear, to depose us

by implication. My father

takes a different angle.

The condition is impossible. We

will never fall. My son, my son,

this prophecy only tells us

what we already know:

            the Presaggio empire

            is invincible.

I nod my head and

smile and

I hide my dresses in the back of my closet,

behind the well-made suits and magic siphons

and the hefty sword borne by every male heir of my family

for six hundred years, unwittingly bestowed

upon its second-oldest girl.

My sheer existence

heralds the beginning

of the end.

I wonder when my family—so mighty, so

naïve—will realize

that I foretell their doom.