Zoë Däe

Primeval

My grandmother’s hands yanked me from my mother’s body and dragged me into this world. My mother was squatted in the kitchen, screaming and bleeding. Grandmother could tell by feeling that I was turned over, legs down, but there wasn’t a hospital for miles.

            By some miracle, I came out okay, Grandmother’s hands gripping me by the ankles, and cried without even a slap on the ass. My mother had retired to her knees, laying her face on the cool dirt floor, the cord hanging out of her like animal entrails at the market. Grandmother says I came out smooth—no chunks, no lumps. Just the sweat and blood of my mother, her insides and outsides, slick on my skin.

            I am the miracle, but I still have straight hair like my grandfather, a cruel man driven off by every woman and cast-iron skillet in the township. My fingernails are flat like his, instead of curved and dainty like Mother’s and Grandmother’s. Grandmother lets me partake in the fruits of her baking in the outside kitchen, caresses my hair every night before I fall asleep, but behind her blue eyes is a gray fear, a superstition.

            Something sits back deep in her head, beyond all memories she can recall and all her love.
Something dark holds onto her, grips her wrist like she gripped my infant ankles, and I’m afraid
that something is me.

Zoë Däe is an emerging writer whose work has appeared in Sixfold, Every Day Fiction, and Atlantis Magazine. A born-and-raised Appalachian, she lives in the Blue Ridge Mountains with her wife. You can find her on Twitter and Instagram @zoughey.