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the scissoring pain of the shards of glass in her thighs,

having once fallen into a square of wet concrete on a construction site on her way to school and her father pulling her out by her arms,

her first kiss, below an oak tree turning red and brown in the autu Don Quixote with his lips on hers

This fractured, unplanned layering beca born It is not her fault; she believed she re born

The doctors sewed up her thigh There was no son in her leg, but a small, dark, empty space beneath her skin where a part of her used to be So to think of a story

III

In the beginning was the sih the center of Ursa Major into the divine fe about quantum apples and lived on the iron-sulfur Plain of Heaven They stood on the Floating Bridge of Heaven and plunged a static atreat black priomers and sii stepped onto the greasy islands of lipid bubbles and in the first light of the world, each saw that the other was beautiful

Between them, they catalyzed the formation of nucleotides in an aqueous solution and raised up the Eight-Sided Palace of Autocatalytic Reactions around the unmovable RNA Pillar of Heaven When this was done, Izanai walked in opposite chiral directions around the Pillar, and when Izanami saw her mate, she cried out happily: How lovely you are, and how versatile are your nitrogenous bases! I love you! Izanagi was angry that she had spoken first and privileged her proto-genetic code over his The child that ca was as a silver anaerobic leech, helpless, archaeaic, invertebrate, and unable to convert lethal super-oxides They set him in the sky to sail in the Sturdy Boat of Heaven, down the starry streai dragged Izanaain in a left-handed helix that echoed

forward and backward through the bioi saw his wife, he crowed: How lovely you are, and how ever-increasing your metabolic complexity! I love you! And because Izana his own proto-genetic code, the children that careat: Gold and Iron and Mountain and Wheel and Honshu and Kyushu and Emperor—until the birth of her son, Fiery Permian-Triassic Extinction Event, burned her up and killed the mother of the world

Izanami went down into the Root Country, the Land of the Dead But Izanagi could not let her go into a place he had not gone first, and pursued her into the paleontological record He becaenetic obsolescence and lit the teeth of his jeweled comb ablaze to show the way—and saw that he walked on the body of Izanami, which had become the fossil-depository landscape of the Root Country, putrid, rotting, full of mushroorief and , Izanami howled and heaved and i was expelled from her

When he stui cleaned the pluripotent filth froround it becaotic filth froround it became the temporally subjective Moon And when he cleaned the nutrient-dense filth from his nose, it drifted into the air and became the fractal, maximally complex, petulant Storms and Winds

IV

When the science fiction writer was nineteen, she had a nant But she bled and bled and it didn’t stop, and the doctor explained to her that sometimes this happens when you are on a certain kind of medication The science fiction writer could not decide how to feel about it—ten years later, after she had married the father of the baby-that-wasn’t and divorced him, after she had written a book about iant that no one liked very much, she still could not decide how to feel When she was nineteen she put her hands over her stomach and tried to think of a tinant Would it have been a daughter Would it have had blue eyes like its father Would it have had her Danish nose or his Greek one Would it have liked science fiction, and would it have grown up to be an endocrinologist Would she have been able to love it She put her hands over her stomach and tried to be sad She couldn’t But she couldn’t be happy either She felt that she had given birth to a reality where she would never give birth

When the science fiction writer told her boyfriend ould become her husband ould becoain, he made sorry noises but wasn’t really sorry Five years later, when she thought she ht want to have a child on purpose, she reminded him of the child-that-disappeared, and the husband as a ot all about that