After Birth (First Sentence Exercise)

The baby clung to the vibrant motherstrand that floats in the air, sending glints of starlight out into the black night.

She had thought birth would be the hardest part: the head compressing as her skeletal plates overlapped, the tearing of her amniotic sac, and her body thrust into contact with blood, mucus, shit. The birth is what she had prepared for during her time in utero (exact time uncertain, no clocks in there, certainly no calendars). Her eyes, while still shut, had learned to differentiate light and dark. The webbing between her fingers had disappeared and her fingernails grown. Although she had not yet tasted air (her lungs still contracted like crumpled tissue paper), she had practiced slow meditative breaths to the pulse of the placental blood arriving through her umbilical cord.

Not once had she felt alone or unsure of herself. In the womb, each cell had whispered with the wisdom of the infinite births that had come before hers. Keep your chin down coming through the canal, they'd advised. Don't open your mouth until you know you're out. She had been coddled and sung to, had slept to the stories of ancestral labors. And only when her own cells had grown plump with knowledge and the walls of her heart become sinewy and strong, was it her turn to begin the journey outward.

All of that wisdom was no use to her now. Birth was not, as she had believed, the end of the story. Her fingers dug deeper into the motherstrand. She had been cosseted and fattened if not for the slaughter than at least for this, the unknown. Her skin was prickly in the night air. She inhaled her first breath of cold starlight. As her lungs expanded and her nostrils flared, she let out a howel, long and loud. Then, startled by the beauty of the unmuffled sound of her own voice, she loosened her grip on the motherstrand and discovered the immeasurable exhiliration of flying, falling, free.