That wrongness she’d felt on the roadside at the salt lake. Before Old Lady Salt had intervened. It was back. As if Malia had taken the steel knife to Calliope and not the cord.

It shouldn’t have felt like this.

She was screaming.

Her legs shuddered and gave out; she keeled to her side, curled into a seashell on the mattress. Her body went cold. She was dripping cold sweat. Had Old Lady Salt forsaken her after all? Had Bisabuela? She was dying this time. She was dying and there was no help.

Her first girl, covered in corn, wrapped in husks and a blanket.

Her corn girl.

Calliope rutted open, her body an earthquake-riveted landscape, a city fallen. She blacked out and came to, blacked out and came to, again and again, each time certain she had died. Nala, misshapen and fuzzy though she appeared through Calliope’s milky-filmed eyes, was crying, and the other women were instructing her to calm down, to move out of the way if she was going to cry instead of help. Malia was speaking rapidly in Zuni, pressing strips of cloth against Calliope’s pelvis and thighs, pulling them out blood-soaked, siren-bright red, then reapplying clean cloths and calling out orders. Someone was wrapping Calliope in large, damp towel-like cloths that smelled of patchouli, incense Bisabuela had burned in her home, what felt like a lifetime away. Malia reached inside of Calliope, her palms pressed together and cupped as forceps, and now her voice was calmer, quieter, rhythmic. She was praying. To whom Calliope didn’t know. Her mind was swirling charcoal and blinding white, ribbons of curling smoke and strobing lights.

She couldn’t push. Had no energy. Nothing left.

She felt Malia pulling.

A rigid, coldness from her birth canal.

Not a plum-packed head siphoning through Calliope.

Not a slippery fish.

Was her child dead?

There was no crying.

There were gasps.

The women’s faces were alarm bells.

Was her child dead? She couldn’t form the question into sounds. She blinked and blinked through the haze.

Malia was holding the silent weight.

She handed it to Wowo łashhi, who held it at a distance, chanting low and grief-stricken.

Malia reached back into Calliope.

Was there anything else?

She kneaded Calliope’s abdomen.

An umbilical cord attached to nothing came sliding out like a snake. This was followed by two separate placentas, fat as steaks, the afterbirth.

Wowo łashhi, show her to me, show me my child. Is she dead?

Malia was packing Calliope with cloths. The women were sprinkling cornmeal on the silence in Wowo łashhi’s hands. The age-furrowed grandmother turned toward Calliope.

The last image Calliope saw before her eyes tunneled and the world went dark—her child was not dead. Was not a child, was othered in stone, was petrified.

Her second girl was river-smooth, obsidian-shined. Basalt-heavy.

Her second daughter, black volcanic rock.

TWENTY-NINE

TWENTY-NINE

WATER JAR CHILD