Hips don’t lie. They are the truth-telling giants and the whistle-blowers transmitting through pirate radio. They are also the catacombs and weather satellites of one’s cumulative genealogy. When an old person falls and breaks their hip, it is not just their hip that needs mending, it is also a calcified psychic geography in need of healing. Accumulated history only needs one break, one fracture, a small opening, to find its own level in real-time. The torrent comes—the filed rejections, your daughter’s grief when she lost her first child, your husband’s infidelity, your glasses being swiped at and stomped on when the fight broke out (their three against your one), the colors of your grief and repentance and serial ineptitude running and running and running.

   Hips, when projected boldly into sex or dance, carry out eulogy and fiesta all at once, a woozy New Orleans funeral march parceling out grief and joy in a single continuous movement, and you can’t help but feel lighter, a small bird announcing its delicate wings to drizzles of flight.