It was very soon after Perley was born. His birth had been easy, no big deal, except for the pain so bad you couldn’t even call it pain, it was just my life, me begging for drugs, and Karen holding my hand, saying, You don’t need drugs, Lily, you can do this, you’re strong, just think about what your grandma would have done, and me screaming, You don’t know shit about me and you don’t know shit about my grandma, I’m praying to her right now and she’s answering my prayer, she’s telling you to shut the fuck up, and then one more long push and then Karen caught the baby. Green shit and blood plumed into the tub. The three of us crawled into bed and laughed and bled a little more and rested, baby Perley coated with white mud from inside me. We left it on him, just rubbed it into his skin, like my grandma would have done. We didn’t want him to catch cold. There was no way you were going to touch our boy with water.

Karen and I spent long days next to the woodstove in our snug cabin at the Land Trust. We passed Perley between us, watching his shit turn from black to yellow, his umbilical stump fall off, his wizened face grow rosy. He was all out of size, enormous testicles, miniature toenails, eyes two-thirds the size of his head, no neck to speak of. Our baby. We witnessed his long hours of sleep and long hours of wailing, stared into his open mouth, lost ourselves down the tiny black pit of his throat. Sometimes we looked at each other, but hardly recognized the one who looked back at us across that baby, the one who’d gone from lover to coworker overnight. My coworker fed me bowl after bowl of stew or casserole or meat pie. She kept the fire stoked. She whittled a spork, a lopsided top, four cubes that she marked to make a set of dice. She reread her old ElfQuest comic books, holding the pages up before Perley’s unfocused eyes. We ate and slept and washed diapers and hung diapers to dry over the stove.