I took her fingerprint when she died. Wrenched off the end of a blue biro in my handbag and squeezed the run of it into the plastic lid of a juice bottle. I’m not proud of it, but I forced her cold pinky a bit, and it made a little crick, which quaked in the silence of that antiseptic room. All I had to print it on was an old envelope from her birthday—her only birthday—and I fanned it dry. Careful not to smudge her text.
I don’t really know what I hoped to make of it, but after all the precious days we had spent, I couldn’t bear the thought of more time coiling out a new path without her. Without the print of her. I was furtive and quick, but I’m sure someone will have noticed, as her colour greyed out, how one fingertip remained royally blue.
I photocopied the print later. Enlarged it tenfold, then twenty and framed up monochrome versions of her little finger in pink and yellow. Some days I stared at that labyrinth of her and traced the pathways of whorl and the confluence of lines merging into a great river. Her rapids and tributaries, her great whirlpool dragging us both into a spinning undertow. Somewhere to emerge from. And I did emerge, though it was like the half-formed kernel of an almond—bitter, pale on the outside and filled with a delicate pulp.
To start a life and give it breath is a great biological wonder, which often detours towards the godly when contemplated at length, but humanity has broken it down into amino acids and various strings, million-strong patterns of turns and signposts. Stored in banks of cells and tissues by order of the Department of Health and Population.
In the chaos of birth, a clear-eyed technician came to catch the font of umbilical blood in a sterile vessel and sealed it up to solve her future crimes or cure her future ills with undiscovered treatments.
*
It is a fantasy now, that future, so when I step through the hissing doors of Cellbank Nine I am unsure what I will say, except that it will be a story of my own making.
‘My daughter,’ I croak, clearing my throat. ‘My daughter—is in here.’ I know I am half mad and the busty receptionist smiles like she recognises it.
‘Her name?’ Head held sideways, cutesy, quizzical. I feel my face shake. ‘You want to see your daughter, madam?’
I nod, nod more.
‘She works here?’
‘No, no, no.’ Sounds like a stutter and I stare down the long line of the counter, polished to a shimmer, trying to find clarity.
‘No. She’s stored in here.’ I raise myself with a deep breath and try to assert. ‘Her stem cells.’
She smiles then, lips like an inner tube, and spurs into action tapping her fake nails on a screen, which she hands over to me. ‘Just fill in your details and I’ll get the Custodian to see you.’ On her tattooed wrist is a tiny skull wound with vines, and I take the screen and sit by the window to write into it.
I form those familiar letters into the word for her—Edith. This keeps her real. She materialises with each letter, with her date of birth—they solidify her delicate bones and sketch out her profile. It is winter, but a pale sun reflects off the screen, obliterating all words but her own. In her last days, her pupils grew wide and dark, the deepest kind of dark that sank my heart and drew me into a place of vision and blindness. I am impaired since she has gone, though some days I see things form so clearly in the blackness they are like gifts of prophecy.
The fingerprint was a gift.
*
The Custodian’s face is lumpy as cold porridge, pocked and pale. He greets me with a damp handshake then hoists his pants and turns down a silent corridor broken up by framed prints of the sea frozen in a tumult of surf. I trail behind his unnatural shape, ponytail drooping down his rounded back, into a windowless office. He hefts onto a chair. Four plastic Ninja Turtles are stuck to the top of his computer. He taps at the keyboard.
‘I have her record here.’ He waits for my explanation. I stare at him, not sure what to say. His pale, thick fingers hover and he clicks his tongue in the silence.
‘When you deposited the sample you had dual signatures…’ He raises the end of the sentence to imply unasked questions. I already hate him.
I croak again, clear my throat. ‘My daughter Edith died two weeks ago.’
He glances at his screen and turns to me, his blue eyes doleful. He seems to choose his words carefully, purses his lips. ‘I’m sorry for your loss, Joanna.’ Makes eye contact briefly.
Without stopping to think it through, I say quickly, ‘Not much good it did to store her stem cells, but I guess I have decisions to make because that’s all I have left of her. I want it to count for something.’ I shift in my seat, lean forward. His eye travels down my chest. ‘So, what are my options?’
The Custodian jiggles his right leg, reminds me that whatever I decide I need her father’s consent. I tell him we’ve separated and he releases an audible exhalation, wheeling his chair under the desk. He taps and clicks.
‘There are a few options for Edith’s cells.’ He says her name gently, slowly. I like him a little more. ‘Besides humane disposal, you can elect to have them de-identified and stored for research. We provide for two research centres from here.’ He turns to me, dragging a stray hair over his head to the back. ‘Are you aware of that, Joanna?’
I shake my head, feel my breath short and anxious. He wets his lips.
‘There’s medical research, where we are using the cells to develop prototype therapies for things like organ and skin regeneration. So for those we keep some identifiers with the sample.’
‘These actually get used in people?’
He nods at me with a crooked smile and I look away, searching for something to focus on, uneasy with this stranger who seems to know more about the remains of my daughter than I do.
‘So there might be people living with parts generated from her?’
Nods again. ‘Yep, sometimes. Pretty cool to think that, hey?’
‘No, no, no,’ I stutter again. ‘Not cool.’ She should have her parts—her eyes, her heart, her skin—not a stranger. I know nothing about how this happens, but I know I don’t want her parts on another person.
‘It can save lives, or improve them so people can live normally.’ He keeps it vague, shifting his weight in the chair. ‘But it’s up to you—we never make you do anything.’ He sniffs a bit, reaches a finger to scratch under his ponytail and looks at the screen. ‘What did she die from?’
I focus on the Ninja Turtles for a moment. ‘A preventable condition. Hereditary.’ I am flat, hollow. ‘I wouldn’t have the screening tests. Didn’t want to take the risk.’ Henry did though; he wanted the tests and it was a major issue when she was diagnosed. It broke him. I broke him. And her. That’s what he said to me and he left me to live through it alone. To decide the moment when it was enough, to let them inject her into awful stillness. He came to say goodbye, had me turned out into the hallway of the hospital. Shut the door for an hour or more. I could have prevented all of it, but that would have prevented her from being who she was.
The Custodian hands me a box of tissues. ‘Well, medical is not an option, then. We also provide materials for arts research.’ He turns the screen to show me a glass dome filled with clear fluid and housing scraps of flesh. ‘But you sign the sample over to the artist and don’t normally have any involvement after that.’ Tubes of blood run inside and out of the dome to other vessels.
‘What’s that one about?’ I squeeze the damp tissue until my nails mark crescents in the palm of my hand.
He smirks and swipes the screen to an image of a naked woman in a bathtub half filled with milk. ‘It’s called Nineteen Nipples,’ he says, jiggling his leg again. ‘The artist grew nipples from her own stem cells and had seventeen of them grafted onto her own body.’ He shakes his head and laughs a little.
‘You wouldn’t have any say in a project like this one. Anything could happen.’ He scratches himself again. ‘But there is a Department of Health and Population Ethics Committee that looks at all the projects and it did pass this one, so…’ He lifts the end of the sentence like another question.
The white of the milk and the bath glow in my vision, smooth and illuminated. I hold my breath at the sight of it. Red rings, like Saturn’s, radiate around the nipples growing on her stomach, her thighs, her face. They whirl and eddy, rivulets of white shifting gently in concentric ripples across her waist. The image is not still but seems to be a subtle time lapse. She rises and falls softly with her breath. The scar tissue is brutal. Beautiful.
‘There’s no rush,’ he says. ‘You can leave her cell sample here.’ In the white vision, all I see are red circles and the lines of her fingerprint etched like ripples in milk. She was just a baby.
‘No, I think that’s for me,’ I tell him, not really thinking, just acting on my little window of vision, my prophecy.
‘Donate her cells to the artists? You’re sure?’
‘Yes.’ The days of breastfeeding were short. She was sick from the start. The sweet rosebud of her lips, rimmed with pale milk. There was a moment there of pure motherhood. The best it can be. ‘To this artist.’
‘Anonymously?’ He is surprised, his eyes flick away with unspoken criticisms.
‘No. I want her to know she is working with Edith.’
He nods. ‘I’ll have to put through a request to the child’s father for his approval. You do realise, if he says no, that you will have to make another decision until you both agree.’
He will agree. He won’t care. He is burying his sorrow in work and won’t talk about Edith at all. He answers my emails, cursory and with purpose. Yes, he will write, I approve.
A week later an email comes from the Custodian to say the sample of Edith’s cord blood is ready for handover to the artist, who is excited to accept this donation.
*
I am no longer alive as I was before. Each day I erode in on myself, great bergs of me crashing into the abyss. There is little to salvage.
On Tuesday, I pass through the tight, hissing door of Cellbank Nine and wait on a hard chair, watching a pointless game show. I recognise the artist when she walks into reception and asks for the Custodian. ‘Artemis Ephesia,’ she tells the woman with the fake nails. I am hesitant to speak to her, uncomfortably silent, and I turn away, avoiding the urge to seek out the nipples all over her. Soon the Custodian has opened the door, hoisting his pants, and dashes a glance from me to the artist. Smirks.
‘Hello, Joanna,’ he greets me and steps towards Artemis Ephesia with an outstretched hand. ‘If we can go to my office, we’ll get started on the paperwork.’
He leads us down the corridor with the frozen waves. She is tall, long and elegant as a model, and I feel squat and tepid beside her. She carries herself with grace and pride. I can’t help but wonder how she did it. How it feels.
In his office, the toxic scent of microwaved noodles clouds the air and a bowl by the computer is coated in a thick film. We sit silent for a moment while he taps at his screen. Finally, once we have discussed payment, he turns to the artist and says, ‘And Artemis, will you be storing the sample with us?’
‘Just for a short time, yes.’ She smiles warmly at me. ‘Thank you, Joanna.’ I don’t know what to say so I just smile back faintly. She waves her credit card in front of the Custodian and he taps away on his keyboard. Then she looks at me closely. ‘No, really. Thank you. I know you are entrusting me with the precious cells of your daughter.’
I want to cry, but swallow it. ‘Edith. Edith was her name.’ The past tense. So grim and permanent. It catches in my chest and I thrash inside like a hooked fish. Open-mouthed in the cold office, wanting to scream.
*
Later we sit opposite each other in a noisy cafe and order tea. She asks me to tell her about Edith. She liked to hold things—my finger or a rattle; sometimes I would give her things to squeeze in her tiny fist, like the head of a lavender flower or some citrus peel. To give her some sensory experience of the world. For the first few months, I had her at home, but it became too risky and in the end she was on life support. When I tell her about trying to breastfeed—the choking on my milk, breathing it into her lungs—I reel back into the present and away from the awful truth of it being my fault. That she shouldn’t have been born and gone through that. That I refused the tests. I tell her about the fingerprint and she sips lemongrass tea with her long fingers grasping the cup like a grail. Listening gently, intensely. Absorbing more than my words.
When I have purged myself, the tea is cold and she orders some more, leaving me alone for a moment. This decision feels very firm.
When she returns and sits, her eyes are alight and I almost expect wings to unfurl from her back. Something so radiant.
‘I have some ideas,’ she says, as if they are a gift bestowed on her from above and she sits forward, the flush of her cheeks deepening the pink of the nipples grafted onto her face. They move as she speaks but don’t detract from her beauty. She seems almost sacred, like a creature transcended. ‘How do you feel about being part of this work?’ She waits. ‘I mean having things done to your body, with Edith’s cells.’
She goes on, describing her vision, articulate hands stretching at the air, drawing down in front of her, resting on her abdomen.
‘I see you reuniting with your daughter in flesh. Stitching her cells back into you so she can have your life and be part of you again.’
It seems only fitting to make amends, to give her my life when her own was clipped short. Artemis explains she will do some sketches, speak to her medical technician, and we will meet again in a couple of weeks. She wraps herself around me in a tight hug.
*
Artemis’s studio is in the mountains, and on a clear day I take the train, ascending into the foothills amid banks of trees and thinning population. At the station, the air is quickly cold, and I spend the night at an old guesthouse with clean but spartan rooms and wake to the scent of breakfast frying. I can’t eat. Anxious. Very, very anxious. This past year I have sunken, my body a hollowed grave.
She welcomes me into a large warehouse, freshly painted in white. The scent of beeswax, and chemicals I don’t recognise. Two proper rooms are built inside the warehouse, sealed with firm, white doors. Her dark hair is tied up into a bun and she wears work boots and a khaki apron, smeared with colour. She tours me around, introducing me to a couple of young artists scratching into copper plates coated in beeswax, showing me the photographic space, draped in white sheets. The rooms are the Lab and the Glasshouse, both clean spaces, she says, though doesn’t open the doors and leads me instead towards a corner with lounge chairs, plants and a burning candle.
I am afraid to make eye contact with her. She is even stronger in her own domain, commanding and tall, striding around the studio. She sits beside me, close so that her thigh is warm against mine, and opens a folder of drawings on the low table, leafing through. She stops halfway.
‘This one,’ she sighs, beckoning me to lean over and look. ‘This’—she points at a drawn abdomen—‘is how we will reunite you with Edith.’ The first drawing has stitches circling and swirling in the form of a fingerprint sewn into the skin.
‘What do you think, Joanna?’
My pulse quickens a little. ‘Will you use her fingerprint?’ Since the day I made it, it has been an emblem of grief and guilt. A transgression.
She smiles. ‘Of course. But this is only phase one. The stitches and piercings we will use to form the print on you will be seeded with Edith’s cells—her mesenchymal stromal cells, which will be able to grow tissue.’
She turns the page. In the second drawing, the stitches are plump with flesh, the fingerprint extruding into a relief sculpture, highlighted with points of darker blossom.
‘I’m so excited by this project, Joanna. To bring your daughter back to you is a great privilege.’
I am hot inside, as if an infection is about to break and sweet relief to my agony is close.
‘I’m excited too.’ I clear my throat, try not to cry. ‘It is a beautiful memorial to her.’
She reclines in the seat beside me, smiling widely, and explains that the process will take about three months and I will need to sign my permission so we can proceed ethically. I will agree to be photographed before, during and after so she can document and then exhibit the work.
‘I have to make some money out of it.’ Artemis waves her arms around the studio to indicate the scale of what she has to support financially. ‘But you, of course, will be the original and you will retain ownership of our original.’ Her eyes seem to dance with that angelic light I have seen in her and she hands me a document for my signature. I scrawl, a tremor in my hands.
After she makes me tea, she leads me to the photography studio where a table is draped with a white sheet and a camera suspended from a movable track above. There are arrays of lights.
‘Do you have the fingerprint?’
I send it from my phone to hers, which shudders in response in her apron pocket. She flicks on a heater and asks me to take off everything except my underwear and lie down. She pats a pillow at one end and walks away, drawing a sheet across to give me privacy.
My breath is shallow and I wonder what questions I should ask about infection and the what-ifs. Things could go wrong, terribly wrong. The sheet shifts slightly and she returns, quickened with excitement and carrying a small toolbox.
‘Now, let’s have a good look at this canvas. We have a masterpiece to plan.’ She rubs my arm. ‘Are you warm enough?’
She is gentle and my questions sink away. I nod and thank her, telling her I am comfortable. Artemis tosses her jacket into a far corner, reveals her bare arms for the first time and climbs up and down a stepladder, adjusting the camera and lights. I watch them, the nipples—they are puckered and inert, and now lack the mystique they had in the bathtub image.
‘How did you do it?’ I finally ask.
She follows my gaze. ‘Skin grafts. We took biopsies from my own nipples and grew them in the Glasshouse. Then my technician grafted them on. Just not to the chest where you’d expect them.’ She laughs. ‘They’re meant to be ironic.’
‘Do they have feeling?’ I can ask her now; I am mostly naked here as she stands beside me, her hands on my flesh.
‘Yes, but not like a true nipple. And they are tattooed up to a natural colour. The grafts were a little pale. Too inconspicuous.’
She lifts the veil from me, my darkness recedes in her light. She looks close and intent at my abdomen and pulls the elastic on my underpants down a little. I am silent, close my eyes. The camera ticks and I hear her move around. Something cold and wet on my skin. She is hovering over me, dark hair loose and thick as a shroud across her face. She is painting onto my body. Immersed in her art. I am her canvas.
Henry traced his fingers on my flesh once, focusing himself on that life we’d created—invisible then, in her own cocoon. Unknown and untested. I remember the smiling joy of that time, the potential for unity. The camera ticks and she moves the light. And all that has happened has led me here.
Across my abdomen, Edith’s fingerprint is sketched in royal blue from my breastbone down into the embrace of my pelvis.
I descend from the mountains on the evening train with a deep pain in my chest and weep in my bed until I am wrung out.
*
I am draining out the sediment of myself. I pack up the unwanted linen and crockery and pare my life back. The unworn clothes that might have seen her through a couple of seasons, new and packaged. A few things retain the scent of her—the things she gripped with her fierce hold, trying to inscribe herself into the world, which would not offer up its balms and miracles. I keep them close, but there is precious little. I donate the rest.
And all the while her cells are being thawed and cultured, reinvigorated and made new. Once they are growing in vitro, they will become a colony that Artemis can transplant onto sutures made from a polymer plastic. I have never been a stitcher, never learned to knit or sew, but I think the repetition of the act might be therapeutic. Now, though, I have no child’s head to knit a beanie for or swaddle into a rainbow scarf, and it all seems pointless. But I will be stitched into a new form, giving my life to her a second time.
The sheer face of the mountain rises either side of the train, which grinds and jerks as it journeys ever upwards. It is overcast, but morning sun lends a blinding glare to the landscape, highlighting the pale and twisted trees and casting a deeper shadow into dense forest, which stretches in endless, untamed valleys far below. One of the young artists, Clancy, collects me from the station and speeds through a maze of bends to a secluded driveway, overgrown with deciduous trees. The gate left partially open.
The artists have laid out a colourful bed with fluffy towels and scented the room, the classical image of a multi-breasted deity on the wall. Caged birds squawk and talk to themselves—small, hunched budgerigars, one sickly and denuded of half its feathers, a team of busy canaries and a large cockatoo. White with a sulphur-yellow comb that sprays up and contracts as he responds to movement in the room. He is moody, she explains. Jealous. The image of the belligerent bird is not helped by her having named him Victor. ‘Just don’t let him out,’ she warns. ‘He’s very destructive.’ And she coos at him so he bounces his head up and down, dancing for her like a supplicant. ‘He loves me too much, don’t you, darling?’
That night I sleep deeply after too much red wine, and the next day Clancy leads me into the Glasshouse.
‘So amazing that you’ve offered Artemis the chance to recreate you.’ He laughs a little between his phrases. ‘She’s such a cutting-edge artist and we all think you’re awesome.’ Entering the studio, his eyes are as luminous as crystals.
It’s a sparse room with a bright light and what looks like an operating table. A cylindrical printer ticks and moves, incrementally drawing up plastic objects from a pool of flesh-coloured syrup. There are closed vessels housing tiny rose-coloured objects glistening in the harsh light. Artemis and her technician are dressed in hospital gowns, her hair in a net. She guides me to a chair to shed my clothes.
‘Completely naked this time please, Joanna.’
She projects the image onto the white sheet of the table. I churn inside, waiting for this reunion, this creation. Like birth, there is the sweetness of wonder glowing brightly beyond the valley of pain. My abdomen contracts.
I climb onto the operating table and wriggle under the image. Her hand on my flesh. The technician, Jeremy, locks his eyes onto me and explains that he will connect me to an IV with a low-grade antibiotic and mild tranquiliser. He will inject the site with local anaesthetic. ‘If you need more, let me know and I can give you more tranquilisers.’ He is calm and efficient with a gentle French accent.
‘Jeremy is a medic,’ she tells me. ‘You’re in safe hands.’ She winks at him over the bed. I wonder at the flirting, but a medic sounds comforting.
I begin to drift, to feel the tug of the threads, the whispers of instructions and response. She speaks about stitches and there is a sharper, stronger sensation as she pierces my flesh. It’s a type of plastic, she tells me, a scaffold for the cells. I lull into a dream space as she stitches me, the rhythm of the punctures keeping me at the edge of sleep.
She wipes the blood from my skin. I smell the metallic tang of it and wonder how much I have lost, but I care little for my own life. It is Edith I am bringing into the world again. Her hair, fine as feathers, sharp little nails biting into my finger.
When I wake, Artemis is fanning my hair around my face and setting up for a photograph, the heater warming her studio space. She smiles at me—‘How are you feeling?’—and raises her eyebrows. ‘A little dozy, huh?’ She touches my waist. ‘But you are amazing. Transformed.’ I close my eyes and she shuffles around, making me her artwork. ‘So beautiful.’ Her hands running over my skin, slicked and oily. The heat of the lights.
I hear Jeremy—‘I am just going to give you a bit of a painkiller, Joanna.’ It pricks my arm and they speak in low tones, wheeling me on the hospital trolley. The world seems to spin. The birds. I fall into the darkness.
*
My body is encased in something hard but warm inside, like a tepid bath. My arms are free and there is a little bell on the table beside me in the room in her house. A candle burns and I ring, panicked, because I can’t move. Clancy responds quickly, tells me he will get Artemis. Asks how I feel. Anxious, I tell him. He says nothing.
A red silk dressing gown flows out around her like a cape as she enters the room. Her dark hair a little skewed from sleep. ‘Sweetie, how are you feeling?’ She taps the cylinder they have clamped around me with her nail. It echoes.
‘I need to wee,’ I croak, throat sore and dry.
‘We’ll have to set you up with a little bag for that.’ My face flushes, heart pounding. ‘Look, if I told you the whole process it might have put you off, but really it will be worth it.’ She smiles, her teeth yellow in the candlelight. There is a shrillness to her voice.
‘What is this thing I’m in?’ I ask.
She breathes audibly, long and calming. ‘It’s a bioreactor to support the growth of Edith’s cells. Jeremy sourced some placental growth hormone from an American supplier and we are feeding her up on that to speed things up. Four weeks. That should get her to the stage where the blooms of her flesh in yours are well formed.’ She rubs her eyes. ‘Are you in pain?’ I shake my head. ‘Clancy can get you something for it if you are. Don’t suffer.’ She shifts her hair and looks over her shoulder towards the birds.
‘Then what, after this?’ I spray it out at her. The cockatoo squawks.
She rolls her eyes back. ‘It’s going to be fine, Joanna, but if you stir up Victor we’ll never get any sleep.’ The young artist stands behind her and she tells him to go and get the tray from the kitchen. ‘Clancy will help you with breakfast and make sure you have everything you need.’
She takes hold of my hand in hers, kisses my fingertips with her dry lips and walks away.
*
The days pass so slowly I can almost count their time to my pulse. Moments stretch in ways I had longed for while Edith was alive, curving out in arcs and spinning into whirlpools where my thoughts descend to places of immense darkness.
If I could jump to my death I would be spring-loaded, but locked in this half-coffin of fluid means I’m only consumed by thoughts and occasionally distracted by films, which Clancy curates with himself in mind. Hours of superheroes, or drag queens vying against each other for a bounty of makeup. The skin around my stomach itches furiously around the stitches. They coated my body in some kind of grease, but I wonder how puckered and pale it will be, preserved like a pickled artefact.
The bioreactor hums softly in the night, keeping the liquid inside at a consistent temperature so that I never sleep. Just fitful naps followed by hours of staring into the dark. Early afternoon sun reaches into the room and shimmers off its metallic dome, which I face. Day after day. Every one of them endless and stretching to its slow fade while the world goes on.
I hear them speaking of other projects. The sickly budgerigar dies and Artemis is inconsolable. I wonder if she will create something from its remains. Clancy is silent when I ask about these things but later gives an effusive monologue on what an amazing, world-renowned artist she is becoming, how she pushes the boundaries of art and creation. It isn’t long before I begin to dislike him too.
I am so consumed with fear of what is happening inside that liquid that I forget about Edith. The real her. What I chose and what Artemis has done to me can never imitate the life that was in her. She is gone and her cells can’t recreate her as she was—who she was. I was wrong. Broken. Denying the truth of her being. Reviving her flesh will never bring back her life.
Eventually Jeremy unlocks the seal on the top of the awful sarcophagus, and a waft of scent comes out that’s briny as an estuary. They both peer in at their work, grinning. ‘You’re done,’ Artemis announces. They prepare for my unveiling with a small feast and give me champagne through a straw.
The next morning, Clancy takes me into the photography studio. Perfumed oils scent the air. Frankincense perhaps. A small entourage of strangers is dressed in white overalls, hair covered with nets and wearing latex gloves. Artemis and Clancy adjust the cameras and lights. My breath is shallow, panicked. Not at my public nakedness but with fear at what I have become. The irreversible nature of this act.
Jeremy drains half of the rancid liquid away, slowly relieving me of the weight I had grown accustomed to, and unwinds the butterfly-shaped screws around the central seal. Cameras tick and the entourage comes forward, one on each corner, to lift the lid. It is as though it were the tomb of a pharaoh. I close my eyes. Try to remove my mind from the moment.
There are audible gasps. Artemis orders them to wait while the cameras capture that moment, my body afloat in the juice of its ferment, grown unfamiliar as an alien.
Hands immerse into the tub and support me, and I am surfacing, emerging from that horrid bathtub like a newborn monster. Slow as ritual. Artemis is at her most elegant and animated, satisfied with her creative work. I drip. The sound of it echoes in the abandoned vessel. The assistants lay me out on the bed and pat me dry with a fluffy towel. And then it is done, complete. I am laid out like a corpse and stiff with terror, and then she is there, smoothing my hair with her warm hand, running her fingers over my flesh.
‘Oh but you are so beautiful, Joanna. You must see what we’ve done. How exotic you are.’ I open my eyes and prop myself up on my elbows. Those bobbles of pink flesh, swirling and eddying into the form of a fingerprint. Those red blossoms, sprouting like awful succulents around plastic piercings. Fragments of her, forever marked into me like a brand. She has grown in me since the day she was conceived. But there was never a need for such memorial, really. As though I could forget.
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