Although generally you will not find it to be so, in this village, the girl’s belly is held in high esteem. Her husband, dead after his tractor ran over an unseen rock and capsized, left his seed there. They crowded her to protect her from the sight of his death, for she was almost ready to give birth. The child! The child! they whisper, pressing against her with their somber sweaty hands (for her husband was a loved man, a powerful man). They crowd her in the hopes that she will birth something better than they are. Suddenly she is a part of—what? In stories, girls are changed into cows or trees or rivers, or they are made to lie with swans and bulls and rivers. Even eating an innocent berry on the forsaken moor can get one pregnant by some vegetable god.

They say that the girl has ripened, is about to produce fruit. Her husband would not have fruited, ripened, even if he hadn’t died. And so the girl has learned that the location of her metamorphosis is her womb. But what does the girl want? And what the womb?

The girl cannot breathe. The child moves like an earthquake within her, shows its handprint, its footprint, through the skin of her belly. The girl wants it to wrap its hand around her finger. She wants it out. She wants to be alone. She wants nothing more than to steal chocolates and crouch someplace alone, hidden, alone, to eat.

The girl runs. She runs until she feels a warning spasm in her back. She stops at the graveyard. She can see that the last season of digging found the same old dirt buried beneath the new ashes, the new bones, beneath the midden heap and the broken crockery, beneath the stories that couldn’t change, beneath the this and the that of the words the villagers speak. It is clear, she reminds herself, that a bone is a bone, no matter where it’s found.