The pain starts to take over and swell up from within me, exploding in a mighty roar that startles the birds from the trees. She is tearing through me and everything is clenched so tightly I forget to breathe and there are spots in front of my eyes and I think the human body is a failure of evolution because it was not meant to withstand this, our shape is wrong, our capacity is wrong, and yet women do this every day and they survive and so that’s what I’ll do, I will do this and survive because afterward I will need to get the baby to safety.
