Description: ***This excerpt is from an advance uncorrected copy proof*** Copyright 2016 Marisa Silver Predstavte si kvetinu!" the midwife yells, her voice reach- ing the baby as warped and concave sounds. "Pictuuure a flowaahhherrr." Next, another voice, closer this time, the sound so near that if the baby could stretch its arm it might touch it. "You bitch!" the voice howls. "You monster! Get out of me now!" Agta Jancek is enraged that this should be happening to her even though she has wished for it and prayed for it, consulted the gypsy witch Zlata, and buried amulets of animal bones wrapped in the hair of a vir- gin for it. But old as she is--and tough threads of gray streak her hair and sprout from the colorless mole on her chin and thinly veil her pubis where there was once a dark, luxurious thatch--the old stories of childhood hold sway. Her mother warned her about this moment. It was a cautionary bedtime story chanted night after night: little Agta, the prettiest girl in the village, lives in a magical paradise filled with delicious honey-scented medovnik and talking bunny rabbits. Then one day, a terrible monster comes and whispers in her ear words sweeter than any jam, sweeter even than her favorite candies that hang from the Christmas tree each year and which she is forbidden to pull off until Christmas Day, even though this means surrendering the low-hanging chocolate treasures to the mice and rats who skitter across the floorboards at night and gorge themselves, their nocturnal pleasures mapped by a trail of black pellets. But little Agta cannot resist the tanta- lizing whispers of the monster and she allows him to touch her face and stroke her body and climb on top of her and shove his hard sausage between her soft thighs. Unh . . . unh, her mother would grunt, her voice a striking imitation of the guttural efforts Agta heard most nights coming from behind the thin lace cur- tain that separated her parents'' bed from the one she shared with her five brothers and sisters. And then, what next? Pretty Agta grows fat as a pig, fat as a cow. Her little tzitzis, once tender and delicate as meringue, become achy and so swollen they have to be held up by a harness of cloth that winds round her back and hal- ters at the nape of her neck. Months go by and the beautiful, smooth skin of her belly becomes striped like a zebra''s as her flesh stretches and pulls. And then finally, after backache and fat fin- gers and a burning in her gut so fierce she will think a match has been struck inside her, Agta''s body will split in two. First the body and then the heart. Good night. Sleep tight. The bedbugs will surely bite. But her mother is long dead and is not here to sigh and shake her head with false sympathy for her daughter''s pain. "A flowwerrrr openingggg," the midwife calmly insists. "You bitch, you whore, you fucking fuck!" Agta rages, her voice becoming clearer to the baby as it begins to swim through the dark tunnel, its head pushing against something hard, then something soft, then something hard again, as if it were a paper boat in a swift current, banging up against rocks then drifting into a calm eddy only to be drawn back helplessly into the propelling current once more. "You ugly whore who no man will fuck even with his eyes closed!" The midwife laughs. She has heard far worse. "A rose opening," she persists, "the petals pushing out . . . out . . . Ano. Ano." The baby twists down and up a U valve, which is something it will get to know very well when Vclav Jancek, the father (who, by the way, is nowhere to be heard, who is hiding in the chicken coop that smells like hell, having been neglected by his wife these past twenty-seven hours of her hair-raising labor) will set his child to crawling around the crude plumbing of the first sinks and toilets in the village. And the midwife shouts: "It''s blooooming, blooming, I can see the bud . . ." "A whore with so much hair growing on your face a man thinks he is making love to a mirror--" "It reaches for the sunlight, up and up and up and--" Agta lets loose with a wretched sound that is so loud in the baby''s narrow ear canal that the dawning light is occluded by the sheer thickness of the roar. "Yes! Yes! A rose! A beautiful pink . . . a beautiful. . . . a--" And now, Vclav hears nothing coming from the house, not the curses of his wife, nor the scream of an infant, nor the trium- phant exclamations of the midwife who can add one more to her tally of live births, only the infernal squawking of the hens. In his panic he picks up a cackling rooster and stus its head under his armpit, an action he will regret when he has to buy a replace- ment for the suocated bird. The silence is so dense that it is just as hard on the baby''s eardrums as any sound. It is the silence that will become a refrain, when a stranger falls speechless in the child''s presence, or when a villager pushes her children behind her skirts as she passes in the narrow market lanes to protect them from what might be catching. The child will learn to hear the complicated messages that fill these silences just the way, years later, imprisoned, it will stand in an unlit cell and study the darkness until all the hues that make it up have been accounted for and named, a painstaking ritual that proves that out of nothing comes everything. Just as now, out of that hush comes a sound at first so soft that it could be a whisper traveling from the farthest star, from the outer reaches of the universe where all time goes, where all his- tory, all wars, all arguments between husbands and wives, all the unanswered wishes of mothers for their children to be perfect and to live long and happy lives gather and mingle, making small talk about the deluded humans who thought that the past was something that could be put away and forgotten, who believed that the future was a story they could make their own. The small sound begins to stretch and expand until it finally ruptures: "Ayeeeee!" Agta howls in fright. "What is this thing?" This thing, of course, is a baby. Forty centimeters of baby to be precise although no one bothers to measure. No one thinks to enact the rituals of inspection that normally attend a birth--the delicate washing, the Finger and toe counting, the near-scholarly examination of genitalia for signs of future procreative success. No one oers that the child looks like the father (eyes shaped like the downward smile of nail parings) or that it has a mouth shaped like a perfect raspberry-colored bow that Agta will Finally but not now, not yet, claim as her legacy even though she is so old that her lips are no longer supported by a full set of teeth and have nearly collapsed inside her mouth. No one mentions that the baby has hair the color of dead grandmother Ljuba, whose axen locks were her pride, for to make these comparisons is to lay claim, to stamp the child as family so that when the cord is cut and the baby is Finally free of Agta''s body, every- one will know to whom it belongs. For Vclav and Agta to assert ownership would be to admit that they are cursed, that this child they have prayed for, waited for, that comes to them after neighbors have joked about Vclav still being able to stand at attention and about Agta''s womb being Filled with cobwebs has turned out to be this thing, this foreshortened object, this disproportionate dollhouse version of an infant. It is as though, coming so late to the feast, the plumber and his wife have been given only leftovers, the hardened heels of bread and the tough ends of beef that others have passed over. "A girl," Vclav says, still smelling of feathers and dead rooster. He hasn''t yet touched the child, only ordered the midwife to unwrap the swaddling to reveal the naked declaration of its worth. He speaks with a little hitch of satisfaction as if the sex somehow proves that the fault is not his. Agta, who has not yet looked at her daughter since that First, alarming view, lies on the bloodstained bed with her back turned away from the onion basket that serves as a cradle, staring at the varicose cracks in the wall, praying either to sleep herself to death or to wake from what must surely be a nightmare. All the while she murmurs: Is it real? It isn''t real. Is it? Even when the baby mews from hunger, Agta does not reach for her. What use are her false comforts?-- her milk has not yet begun to ow. The midwife shows Vclav how to settle the baby with sugar water, collects her money, then leaves the house in a hurry, not eager to prolong her association with this blighted birth and damage her reputation. A day later, Agta''s milk has still not come in, but she is not surprised that it is unwilling to spend itself on such a lost cause. Exhausted by the birth, she sleeps and wakes and then, remembering what she has brought into the world, sleeps again, leaving her husband to administer the sugar water. Perhaps she hopes that if she pays the baby no mind the child will simply disappear, return to the land of wishes it came from and that she will wake up with only a memory of a vague but unnameable disappointment that will be forgotten in the daily skirmish of cleaning and cooking and arguing vegetable prices with market cheats. But her crotch will not let her forget. A thing so small ripping her from fore to aft so that she has to bite down on the handle of a wooden spoon when she pees. Returning to her bed, she glances at the baby girl who is so tiny, so nearly not there. Her head is too large for her torso, her arms and legs too short. She looks like a rag doll sewn together from cast-off parts. Each time Agta wakes, it seems

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