Calliope liked Nala, she could tell. Or at least, if Calliope were not doubled over with the feeling that her ass was about to split open and the whole of the cosmos was going to come quivering out of her, she would have liked Nala. The young woman had a round, flat nose, and she kept her dark hair cropped short with a fringe of thick bangs, which made her face appear as a heart. Curved and shapely, but still babyish in the face, Calliope guessed she must have been seventeen or eighteen. She was lovely.

“The twins are the morning stars,” Nala said. “In Zuni, all twins are good luck. So you must be a good luck mother.”

This was not how Calliope would have described herself, but she tried embracing it, the warrior in a yogi’s warrior pose. She squatted, her legs pressed against the mattress, rooting to the earth. She bore down. She leaned against Nala, who supported her weight while Malia stood behind and pressed her abdomen, kneading it with great vigor. Tears of pain flowing freely, Calliope breathed deeply as the urge to push asserted itself again and again, rocking her as when the labor had been false, but this time with a midwife, Chance’s mother, and all the women of his Coyote clan surrounding her, she was ready. Then the splitting. Her body cleaved from within, so that even her ribs, her lungs, her throat, felt ripped apart, the children inside her cesarean-slicing her, shedding her like snake skin, as if she were the costume and they the real thing. They would kill her to be born. The dress the clan had given her, the color of creamed corn, clung to her sweaty skin. She was a summer sidewalk, a broken cactus, oozing. She pleaded, Bisabuela hold me. Nala whispered, “Good luck, mother, you can do this.”

Calliope was exhausted.

Between her legs, the first baby slid, a slick eel.

Malia grasped the baby tightly, said, “A girl.”

The first girl was screaming. A good sign. Healthy lungs.

Chance’s great-grandmother cut the cord with a steel knife. An aunt brought a woven basket from the table of food to Malia, who dabbed the detached umbilical cord with raw fat and dough. Still breathing raggedly and sweating, Calliope asked what the dough was, and Malia answered, “Unbaked bread.” Calliope smiled, though she didn’t understand. She would ask Chance later.

The first girl was sprinkled with cornmeal.

Beneath the yellowish flakes, the downy fuzz on her head shone black as night. Calliope thought of Andres.

And how every woman in the room believed this girl belonged to Chance.

Still dizzy and dehydrated, Calliope meant to ask for water when the second pain cleaved her in two.

She wasn’t ready; she needed a rest, needed time before pushing out the other child.

The world blurred.

Nala’s face was no longer lovely but a fuzzy mass of shapes, and monstrous.