After the Flood

by Kassandra Montag

CHILDREN THINK WE make them, but we don’t. They exist somewhere else, before us, before time. They come into the world and make us. They make us by breaking us first.

I couldn’t regret my children, but I also couldn’t be free from them, from the way they had opened me up, left me exposed. I had never felt as vulnerable as I had after birth, nor as strong. It was a greater vulnerability than I ever felt facing death, which only felt like a blank expanse, not like free-falling, which was how I felt every day trying to care for Pearl in this world.

“Maybe we don’t always make our fate, but we decide how to meet our fate,” Abran said.

I don’t want to know, I thought. I couldn’t touch that kind of grief, I couldn’t be near it. It felt like a contagion, like someplace I’d been, where if I returned, I might not survive again.

“There was this theory, over two hundred years ago, called the Gaia hypothesis. Essentially that all living matter on earth works together to create life, to make earth habitable. A regulation among matter to fight disorder. Life can’t exist without fighting disorder.”