Tears stream down Allie’s face. Char starts singing “Stair­way to Heaven,” and for once, she gets all the words right.

This must be what some kinds of dying feel like. A mind-numbing, time-freezing, soul-cleaving agony that crushes you into a ragged ball of hurt. Then — in a rush of release that defies all prediction, all expectation, all logic — it is over. The pain. The fear. Every single misgiving you’ve ever had about anyone or anything. Gone. The messy horror of what you’ve just endured, wiped clean from your soul. Until something different starts, as if all the elements that broke apart and dissolved in the dying have come back together in a form that you couldn’t have fathomed until you woke from the tyranny of pain. And you find yourself surrounded by ungodly beauty. This must be what some kinds of reincarnation feel like.

July twenty-third, right at the stroke of midnight, my baby girl is born. And maybe I am reborn then, too.

Before I even hear her take her first screamy breath, I see what my daughter brings with her into this world. A slew of iridescent orbs cascade from between my trembling thighs, filling the room like I just gave birth to a cosmic bubble blowing machine instead of a tiny human miracle. Seconds later, a waxy infant is laid across my chest, still tethered to my insides by a stubborn placental slab. Her eyes are puffed shut. Her skin is thin, there’s crust in the crevices of her arms, her legs, her neck. Her head is lumpy and hairless. She promptly poops all over me. I kiss her slimy, crusty, bald head and tell her she is the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen.

“She smells like a pine tree,” Peggy says, wiping gobs of snot and tears with the back of her bloated hand. “As blessings do.”

Somewhere farther down the Middle Rear Road, an ambulance rips along, sirens wailing. Out in the woods behind my trailer, the Time rips along too, and as word of my baby’s birth spreads, people plan the food they’ll bring and the hours they’ll spend planted on my land until it’s safe from Spenser Mining Inc.’s harm. And from the kitchen, I can hear Peggy muttering about the smell that came quick on the heels of pine tree. The lingering scent of baby powder, of the chaos yet to come. But me? All I can see are the rainbow bubbles around my daughter’s head. And then I hear Mama’s voice singing softly, sweetly,

There was liquor on the barroom floor,

And the bar was closed for the night.

When out of his hole came a little black mouse,

and he sat in the pale moonlight . . .

EPILOGUE

The Swan Song

It is with heavy hearts that we announce the sudden but peaceful passing of Stacey Theresa “Crow” Fortune, age 39, on August 8. Crow passed away at home, in her sleep. She is survived by her precious baby daughter, Raven Jewel Fortune, her husband Willy “Mr. Crow Fortune” Matthews, best friends Allie Walker and Char MacIsaac, a number of aunts and uncles, and her father, Brother Gyaltso Smart Alec Spenser. She was predeceased by several relations, including her much adored maternal grandmother, Lucy, and her dearly missed mother, Effie, who loved Crow more than life itself.