Ave mixes my pink meat into the broth using a wooden spoon, muttering some words to herself. The spoon swims gracefully through the steaming soup, its whorls refusing to touch the pot’s greasy rim, weaving its magic spirals, demonstrating dance steps. The swollen air shapes my essence into steam, infusing the scented vapours of the soup. As the first liquid trickles down her throat her story begins to thaw, filling up the great round hungry space of her stomach like a live bird in a pie.

Ave recalls the day of her own birth. A spiral screws her deep inside the past. She remembers it not as a series of facts, rather an overwhelming sensation of panic, accompanied by sharp flashes of light. As her head moves down her mother’s birth canal and into the world, her spirit sings of loss and bewilderment, violent winds and the fluids draining out around her. She hears a voice repeating a name: Ave! Two strong arms lift her high in the air; she looks down at her mother on the ground and begins to wail.

Wrapped in hessian, tied her to her mother’s back, she is taken deep into the Forest, across the silver River and on, to the burial grounds reserved for birth’s apocrypha. The twigs crackling under her mother’s bare feet. The kind whips of the branches and their berries. See her mother bury the placenta as if it were a blood-red cake, the rope of the umbilical cord and a small bundle of leaves, then returning to the forest clearing, the giant tree house and another bulging woman.

Later, when she is older and continuing her mother’s work, Ave needs no length of string, no trail of crumbs to trace her way back, at the appropriate times, to the place where the mothers’ cakes are buried. Each time, as if by magic, she rows across the river to the Island. The words tumble out of her mouth like vomit as she pours the contents of the still-warm jar onto the ground, the fruity waters soaking quickly into the earth. Then she runs off, in another direction, crashing into the River at a different place, like a frightened animal before a fire.