The others had not warned her about what to expect when she held life in her hands. Perhaps to them, it was a banal sensation, but she had greedily watched them, her little cloud of fairies, coalesce. Whirling, rushing forward, from a hesitant iota of life to something greater, creatures that pushed against the glass walls of their enclosure, arguing with the air and the room and her that here! here they were! No chance for denial, no chance for anything other than their own petulant fury with the state of things. She felt maniacal and infinite, like a god’s surrogate, creating a world from mortal labor instead of divine birth. The language of life was a dead tongue, and though she could name all of their scientific parts, fill the air with dusted jargon, this-that-this-that and onward, she found speech was a disturbance, a hindrance to the thrumming, lively silence enveloping her and her creations.
She had never imagined that she would or even could feel maternal.
No, any speech would be foolish. She felt she was no longer a body, no mouth to run vapidly, no ears to listen passively, simply a pair of eyes looking down and a pair of hands holding the dish, the dish where the bacteria swam in circles and loops, like tadpoles in wait for their transformation, in wait for bodies that better fit their minds and ambitions. That was all that mattered, touch and sight and this miraculous birth. She had never imagined that she would or even could feel maternal. When she looked at a child, she saw a baby bird before it molted, mouth open in darkness, its voice on the verge of melodic but too sharp, too shrill, too starved to soothe, clamoring for food and care and love from a mother circling the clouds, and flapping their infantile wings in a despairing battle against the air. Even when sated, they ate without grace, eyes and throats bulging, little coughs and chokes swelling from their underformed breasts. Her children would never leave the nest, and she held everything they would ever need in a pipette. They would consume without complaint, and if they did speak, it would never reach her ears, the sound forming infinitesimal waves that would lap at the edges of her mind without ever crossing over.
They could be the particles flowing through her bloodstream, life streaming through her arteries in a colored rush.
They swirled lovingly, as if they knew she was watching, as if they felt her gaze and basked in its glow. She felt needed, wanted, but still not satiated. She wanted to tear the lid off and step within, wondering if they would flock to her, mottle her skin, and thread themselves under the expanse of her musculature and around the downy hairs on her arms. They could be the particles flowing through her bloodstream, life streaming through her arteries in a colored rush. After all, she was merely an amalgamation of protozoan creatures like them, the image of what they could look like in some far-off, future era, where humans all laid beneath the earth and her children, now gracefully matured, walked above her bones, stumbling about on their legs or paws or tentacles—or perhaps they would move beyond the conventional, become new beasts unto themselves. Death could not claim her fear if it meant that their life would spring from her form, if she could be the kindling for the bright burn of their spirits.
She was a creator, a mother, the very nemesis of the reaper.
She envisioned the looks of the other scientists. They would say that she was so good at this, that she had been a natural since her first day, that her colony was thriving, writhing and expanding with euphoric inertia. And she would laugh in such a way that it would fill the room with joyous alarm and say she had been trained as an angel-artisan, but the Lord thought her talents were wasted above and so she had descended through a veiled canopy of vapors, brushing her soles against the mountaintops and letting her breath mingle with the sounds of the wild, before gently landing here. Here of all places! A penal colony for the mind, sterile and strange and scientific, where one was meant to think and to know but never venture anywhere beyond. But she was destined to be more. She was a creator, a mother, the very nemesis of the reaper. She looked out the window and did not see the glass but instead the scenery beyond, though all else paled in comparison to the ridges and valleys of her own palm and the newly minted world, in a glass crib and coffin, perched above them.
