Prologue - Sweet Haven

YOU see I didn’t love you. If only there’d been a way to send you back, keep you from pushing your insistent way into the world. What were you in such a hurry for? Go away, Naia. Shrivel. Shrink back into a wet, pulsing mass, into what you were in the first unknowing hours after I made you; go back to the beginning, membrane by membrane, protein by protein, until you are one with my tissues again, until you are no more.

I think of you often, of the night you were born. I cannot understand how these memories come in such clarity—as far as I know I was completely out of it: flat on my back, drugged, praying for liberation from the creature in my body. One hundred and sixty pounds, the center of me risen like a yeast bubble, my legs in the stirrups, sex shaven. The violated follicles emerging as pale bumps—a chicken-skin cunt, like something on a meat counter.

I rise, out of myself, registering the rubber-gloved hands of the doctor, the sick-green walls tiled against surprise fountains of blood. Deep, lowing sounds reverberate through the delivery room and the halls beyond, with their worn wooden benches—empty, for it is long after midnight in this hospital built by the American missionaries back in the 1930s, wing after wing slung upon the wooden structure after the Second World War, the whole place rattling with ghosts. Spectral myself, I listen, detached, levitating, to my cries of birthing distress.

Between my spread legs, your skull emerges. You rip through the curtains of my sex, sliding your fine body out—at birth already an athlete—and in your tiny face a glimpse of the beauty you are to wear to adolescence, though you are compressed, un-sunned, knowing air for the first time. Red all over—a good sign; it means your skin, wiped free of blood and mucus, will be pale, unlike mine. The doctor hoists you up by the ankles. You swing. Your eyes, black and beady, seem to take in the entire world at a glance. Oh, I see the life in their depths.

Nothing else follows. I must have rushed, appalled, back into my own body at that point, unable to face this creature, this hungry new organism—a fetus with a will.

I wake up, and you are in the nursery down the hall. You are powdery white and pink, a complexion that is perfection itself, while all the other infants in the ward are a proletarian terra cotta. Although you are only a day old, it is obvious you are blessed. Naia. My Naia. I descend into feigned sleep, arms over my chest as though to ward you off, dreading the moment I must hold you in my arms.