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WE MUST ALSO POINT OUT THAT THIS IS A WORK OF FICTION. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s lively imagination. Any resemblance to real events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

Are you living in hell?
Well, try to make the most of it.
—Carol Rama

The Book of X

Part I

PART I

I WAS BORN A KNOT LIKE MY MOTHER and her mother before her. Picture three women with their torsos twisted like thick pieces of rope with a single hitch in the center.

The doctors had the same reaction each birth: They lifted our slick warped bodies into the air and stared, horrified.

All three of us wailed, strange new animals, our lineage gnarled, aching, hardened.

Outside, beyond the bright white lights of the hospital, the machine of the world kept grinding on, a metal mouth baring its teeth, a maw waiting to clench down on us.

“I’M NOT RELIGIOUS, BUT I DAMN WELL prayed,” my mother says, exhaling smoke over the kitchen table. “I rubbed the rosaries raw that you would take after your father.”

My mother’s knot rests against the kitchen table. In my tender moments, I want to reach out and place a hand there.

“But as soon as you crowned, I knew it,” my mother says. “I could feel your knot.”

When my mother tells this story, I take long sips of my lemonade to keep quiet. I know she screamed the whole birth. I brought her the same pain she brought her mother.

“Your father says I went possessed. My eyes rolled back into my head.”

THERE ARE 4,500 DIFFERENT TYPES OF knots. There are 3,800 basic variations of these knots. There are an infinite number of ways to combine these knots and their variations. In this way, knots are like stars.

We could have been complicated: Figure eights, clove hitches, sheet bends, reefs, heaving lines.

But our knots are simple: Overhand. Our abdomens twist in and out just once, our bodies wrapping back into themselves, creating dark caverns, coiled as snakes.

IN OLD BLACK-AND-WHITE PHOTOS, MY young mother poses next to my grandmother. Both conceal their knots beneath billowing blouses, standing stiffly on a gray lawn, their gray lips strained into gray smiles over gray teeth.

THE ACRES WERE PASSED DOWN TO MY father from his father and his father before him. A small black sign with white paint says The Acres where our land begins.