It’s hard to remember when exactly it began, why I left, how I ended up where I did and how I did, in the way I did. There may not be enough time to really start at the beginning, to remember or tell it all. But I guess if I really had to think back as far as I could about how and when I could tell somebody was fighting me, arguing and debating and challenging me, pushing me to grab a hold of my life, screaming at me though I couldn’t see the source of the sound, it would be a couple days before that somebody could have even been there. It would have been the fight, I think back. Because whenever I go back to think of all I could have done differently in those last months, it starts with the last fight with my mother. The change that changed me forever really started then. Some man may have burst a seed of life inside of me, but I know now it had always been there.

ONE

WHENEVER ME AND Ma fought, she always went for my hair.

When she was younger, everybody talked about her long, black, silky, Indian in the family hair. My hair’s bright rusty red color is one of the few things my father ever gave me, but I wished I had taken after my mother when it comes to texture and length. Maybe if I had, my life would have been different. Better, easier, calmer. Everybody talks about her “good” hair and whenever they do, she has to remind them how her only child, a girl child at that, wasn’t so lucky. And the hair isn’t the only difference between us. I’m short with a voluptuous butt and big breasts; she’s tall, hippy, with the small tits I haven’t seen since thirteen. Now she’s going gray and bald at the same time. Her hair is always balled up in a bun that looks like a steel wool pad. Most of the time, she wears a scarf.