I was born with a full set of teeth and bit my mother’s flesh exiting into the new world. I didn’t yell because of the bright lights, cold room or the hurly-burly threatening to shatter my zen. I yell at the first glimpse of my father, a monstrous and sweaty man, with a Neanderthal forehead that eclipses a weak and pathetic nose. My future looks dismal.
Forceps dig deep into my temples, a final yank to my arm and I slip artlessly into the doctor’s hands. A vitriolic stench of mother and antiseptic sting hot and blur my vision as I move from person to person, each poking and jamming instruments into my vernix caseosa anointed body.
Then the unveiling; my mother, equally horrific, her eyes, two yellow, lugubrious, protuberances overhanging baggy, purple festoons of skin comes in for the kill. She makes a sucking sound and aims her fleshy pale orifice at my tender cheek and I yowl. Fighting the clumsy grasp of her purple-mottled, jello arms, I scream for a nurse but mother greedily pinches the tender underside of my upper arm bringing me to a state of resignation. I play dead. No one takes heed so I hold my breath and hope for rescue. Blue with effort, I try to kick the nurse who plunges me face-first into a fleshy mound, its dusky brown, nipple shoved unceremoniously into my tightly pursed lips. I protest and bite down hard. Mother grunts with slobbering disapproval. It is hate at first sight.
Five hours later we arrive at home. I hang on to a dream that the parents are an anomalous turn of misfortune, a Darwinian aberration to test the limits of human evolution but my peachy face turns to ash when my father drops my car seat in front of two genetically challenged, despicable specimens I deduce are my siblings. Slugface surrounded by Oh Henry wrappers, scarfs down hamburgers and fries slathered in mayo. Stinkfest hangs upside down from the couch cleaning the jam from his belly button. With accidental forethought straining to direct limb movement, they come at me like moulting, seal maggots clambering over rocks to find their mother. I am held hostage, strapped into a thrift store car seat smelling of rancid milk. My life? Doomed.
As soon as the twins reach my seat, I feel myself heat from within; a fiery, fierce rage that forces the blood from my heart to my brass knuckled fists.
And then shouting.
And then smoke.
I peal into a raucous laughter.
“Fire!” mother yells.