After Birth by Elisa Albert Read Free Book Online Page A

She’ll be in early labor, dancing, some Neil Young on, sage burning, a party, a happening, her friends over, a circle. Raft of women, Mina in the middle, and they’ll invite me in, tell me to stay, and help, join the circle. We’ll move together around her in some primal dance called forth from anonymous foremothers, the ones who came before the ones who came before the ones who came before.
    We’ll calm and soothe her— mmm-hmmm, yes , we’ll say, yes, yes, good, good —hold her all the way through, share in the sweat and strain and glory. Unwavering, unflinching, rooted, brave. We’ll accomplish the impossible act and emerge sisters.
    Can’t sleep. Raccoon or squirrel or whatever is moving around in there, scratching at the insides of our walls. Thump, knock, thump .
    Kind of silly to keep pretending I have a dissertation in the works. Anything at all in the works.
     
    My mother’s mother was prone to miscarriage. She had a bunch, I don’t know how many. More than a few. Maybe it was genetic, maybe it was war trauma, maybe it was psychic, maybe the Good Lord in His Infinite Wisdom simply did not want her bearing children, not after what she had been through, what she had survived.
    Finally, pregnant with my mother at the advanced age of thirty-two, she was prescribed a miracle drug. Even better: an experimental miracle drug. Diethylstilbestrol. DES, for short. Some kind of synthetic estrogen. (Hey, listen, rule of thumb? The minute anyone says “miracle drug,” run. Especially if it’s a lady-specific miracle drug, dig? Opt the fuck out, please. Stay away. They have no idea what they’re doing to you, and they Really Do Not Care.)
    So it did indeed prevent miscarriage, good old DES, but in so doing also—oh yeah, oops, by the way, sorry!—fated the unborn to all manner of cancerous disaster. DES Daughters, they’re called. Too soon to tell whether we Daughters of Daughters will have what are euphemistically referred to as “indicators,” but hey, I’m on the edge of my fucking seat.
    Every few years I get a packet from the CDC. A big white eight-by-ten envelope with their logo: Safer·Healthier·People . It’s vaguely sinister how they track me down, my little epidemiological parole officers.
    The first packet landed in my college mailbox freshman year. I mumbled something to a Health Center doctor about it, gravely offered up the packet, mumble mumble DES something mother died mumble cancer mumble.
    Probably meaningless , the doc said, and shrugged, glancing through the packet. (My mother, dead of medical-establishment hubris. Meaningless? Oh. Okay.)
    Then she offered me that pill where you get your period only four times a year. It’s new , she practically squawked, and wonderfully convenient!
    I yearn to one day rip open a CDC envelope and find a different kind of letter. An on behalf of the entire community, our sincerest apologies for the shortsightedness and carelessness with which we treated the reproductive health of your forebears . . . our bad . . . promise to stop fucking with you ladies , et cetera.
    Anyway then of course my mother had a nearly impossible time getting pregnant herself. The DES Daughters stuff was just coming out, all those shockingly deformed reproductive organs, wow, who knew? So they had to assume it wasn’t going to happen, had no choice but to be okay with it not happening, IVF still mostly a science-fictive question mark, though that first freak guinea pup in England was born the very same year. My parents had been married a while and made their peace. A lot of DES Daughters, it turned out, were in the same boat. My mother’s deformed reproductive organs turned out to be functional, but barely, and on a short fuse, so to speak. The cancer made itself known six months after—surprise—I was born.
     
    Will’s trap has done its thing. Hurrah. A squirrel quivers in it all morning, petrified. Like the baby when we brought him home from the hospital. I stare at