Snake Son

My boy slipped out like a snake rather than human. I had thought I’d be having a daughter like my mother and grandmother and great grandmother, cursed with girls they’d craft into paper perfect caricatures and later chastise for being too beautiful or smart or virtuous. A maternal lineage that only improves with each generation, suboptimal genes stifled into extinction. But I had a boy who wasn’t quite a son. He lacked the qualities I’d come to expect in a baby: no wrinkled eyes or fuzzy hairs too thin to fully hide the scalp. Rather, he lacked eyes. He lacked a scalp made of recognizable human skin. He seemed more unformed than formed, like a partially cooked egg barely containing its yolk. Bits of his brains threatened to spill from fragments of skull. His face stretched like a freshly ironed tablecloth without pattern or fold. I never knew if I was facing him or behind him. His limbs pivoted on their sockets with little resistance, a loosely wound doll whose movements made it no easier to identify where he wanted to go or which way he was oriented. A monster, a beast, a cursed thing, my family declared. Try for a girl next time. And do what with my son? Send him into the ground with a pit of snakes to call family? I refrained from rocking him in my arms or holding him at all, since I couldn’t tell if I was smothering him with my elbow or supporting his back. I only touched him to make sure he was still alive, twitching and wriggling as his limbs gradually lengthened but bore no closer resemblance to “human.” Perhaps centuries of bad genes purged from our lineage of perfect women had accumulated into this creature, my son, a sacrificial conglomerate of waste matter that had pooled in my placenta, surviving like he had to prove a point.