When my Mother was seven and half months pregnant with me she accidentally threw herself down a flight of stairs.

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        When my Mother was seven and half months pregnant with me she accidentally threw herself down a flight of stairs. She hoped that I would die in the accident and she would be able to continue her life without the burden of a child she had never wanted. What she didn’t anticipate was breaking her neck at the bottom. She was rushed to the hospital almost immediately, but it was too late. I, however, was salvaged from her train wreck body.

        Sometimes I wish she‘d had an abortion; I wish I wouldn’t have been given the opportunity to grow up gangly and purple and acid-like.

        Grandma takes out her old shoeboxes of photographs and dumps them into my lap, claiming the two of us looked just alike, my Mother and I. I prod the dark spots under my eyes and wonder if she got as tired of Grandma as I do.

        Grandma looks worn, like a towel that’s been through the laundry too many times, all knotted-unraveling and gray.  You can’t say that, though, cause she’d like as not die of a broken heart right then and there. Her eyes are wise and smoldering, changing from green to yellow like autumn leaves. Around them are wrinkles, networks of worry, a road map of suffering. Her hair is coloured bright red, jagged locks shooting out from her head as though an electric current has passed through her body. She dresses just like her mother did, and tells me one day I will, too.

        Did my Mother wear crumpled sweatshirts and overalls? Was the hair on her arms darker than the hair on her head? Did she brush pop tart crumbs out of her bed before going to sleep? Did her socks ever match?

        I have a special photograph of her in my room, in a wooden frame with ivy curling like smoke in the corners. It’s a photograph from her prom, and her hair is in a cloud of curls around her face. I like it because I can pretend she doesn’t have one. Grandma says she went all alone and smiling.

        I wonder what kind of girl goes to her prom without a date and gets pregnant when she is eighteen years old.

        My uncle Jared is in the picture with her, grinning, his arm around her shoulders.

        Uncle Jared and I get along really well. He hates her, too.

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        He doesn’t mind if I come over and watch bad music videos on his television. He doesn’t make me load the dishwasher and dust the knick-knack shelves. He and his wife are expecting their third baby, though after the first two I don’t know why they would have another. I don’t know why they would have any at all.

        I am sitting in his living room, oblivious to the buzzing of the television and the opened book in my hands, listening to Grandma talk to the baby in Michelle’s stomach. Michelle is Jared’s wife, a slip of a girl with ...

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