I bent down to gather up the baby macaws, but mostly to avoid her gaze.

Doña Antonia’s voice softened. “Besides,” she said. “The tapir was all eaten, and pregnant women need meat.”

I sprinted down the stairs with the birds and scrambled under the longhouse, stowing them next to one of the wooden pillars. I put my fingers down my throat. Nothing came up. Horrendous. I’d been puking steadily for three months and now I eat my own pet and I can’t get her out of me. I gave up, sat back on my haunches, eyes squeezed shut as I pictured Charlotte becoming part of me, my own flesh, my own child.

Cradling the two twirls of turquoise and yellow in my arms, I ran out into the deluge toward where I remembered our new hut to be, unable to catch my breath as the rain pummeled me, beating at the top of my head, my back and shoulders; I couldn’t see two yards in front of me. Each step became a slide until I skied down a valley of greasy mud, the birds flying from my arms. I howled into the thundering rain; it erased my voice. My body, hair, face slathered with mud, I scrambled on my hands and knees until I found one little bird, pitifully muddy and wet, mouth still open, then the other. I gathered them into the front of my dress. I kneeled like that, watching.

In seconds, the basket I had made with my dress filled with water, and the little birds began to float, drenched wings weighing them down, little heads dropping back and sinking until just their yawning pink beaks showed above the surface. In a state of fear and fury at every way I felt I’d been wronged in my life, Charlotte’s death stoking the fires of my self-pity, loneliness, and desperation, I watched them begin to drown. My teen brain screamed the world is turned against me, me, me, always and forever. I wanted to see those little birds die, to have some power over something, take revenge on something, get as used to death as everyone else seemed to be. Soon the water hammered at their squeezed-shut eyes and filled their diamond-shaped mouths, and they disappeared beneath the surface.

Seconds passed. The water churned in my lap as they tried to beat their way to the top, tiny sharp claws scraping and grabbing at the flesh of my thighs through the thin fabric.

For those few moments, I loved watching them die. I was God, kneeling there in my shit dress, knees sinking in the mud, belly full of my beloved pig.

But then something flipped inside me. Only rage had fueled me, and rages pass. I squeezed my eyes shut and saw Omar’s face turning hard, slack with disappointment, knowing I was lying when I told him the birds drowned by accident, because he saw through all my lies.

I stood. A gallon of water flushed from my lap, along with the birds, weak but still moving. Filled with a bottomless remorse, a gutting shame, I bent down to catch them, for the first time feeling the tender swell of my own belly.