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My father lives at the edge of the forest, aiming for feral, when he and my meth-addicted, teenaged mother give life to me.

My mother tells me, "He looked like a wild man coming out of the shadows of the trees."

I imagine that familiar spark of mischief in his wide-set eyes, and his thick auburn hair forming a lion's mane around his broad sun-blushed face, his big smile, like a forest elf, like Robin Hood, sheltered amongst rich earth and resinous green trees. Floating the river all day, under hot sun, through cold splashing rapids, as he told me he did.

I look like him, but my doe eyes show more prey than predator, and my thin brown hair lies straight as a mud slick, except for the horns. He gave me the horns, stubborn wisps of hair in front that curl up.

"He could have had anyone," my mother tells me. "He could have had any of the girls at the parties, and I never understood why he chose me." Little blonde Eve.

My seventeen-year-old mother combs out her long honey hair, straight and fine. She layers on peasant blouse over tie-dyed tank top, patchouli oil on her skin, Indian skirt over velvet pants, rings on toes and fingers, bracelets, beads, silver, and turquoise. She shines. She glows warm and bright.

Four years before: My father at seventeen, with his fifteen-year-old girlfriend, his first Eve, created a baby, as an expression of their love, and they waited for Eve's belly to grow. But that Eve changed her mind and went for an abortion, a little death. She told him after.

My mother, my Eve, goes to the big white farmhouse where many of my father's friends live, a day near the end of summer when she has visited him often. His friend passes on the message that my father has grown tired of seeing her so often.

My mother says, "What am I supposed to do? Put a bag over my head?" Then she stays away. She goes with the next man who presents himself, a dark-haired man who comes out of the forest with my father.

The dark-haired man asks for my father's permission to court little Eve with the long golden hair and the easy smile.

The man sets up house with my mother. A month into their domestic situation, she tells him to expect a baby. The next morning, he abandons her with a note, "See you later, Sweetheart."

He goes straight to my father, straight to ask if the baby could belong to my father.

"Absolutely not," my father says.

So the man returns to my mother to claim the baby whom he plans to call Mikey, after himself. But I arrive as a girl.

On my third day of life outside of my mother's womb, my father arrives at my mother's house, the house she shares with the dark-haired man, the man who refuses to pay for heat or groceries. My father goes straight to the dresser drawer on the floor, straight to the baby. He looks down at me, a round-cheeked, wide-eyed, reddish-haired miniature, nothing like the dark-haired man.

My father turns up the corners of his mouth in an obligatory smile, he offers congratulations, then he leaves.

Mom and Dad bundle me up and take me, still in my first week, into the forest to spend a few nights. Mom tucks me into a sleeping bag near the fire as her mother instructed, after pleas not to take me had failed.

I feel hot and sick, but caught up in the moon and the shadows of the trees, and after a while my mother notices my flushed red cheeks and the sweat-soaked tiny hairs around my face, and she frees me into the cool nighttime spring air.

Learn more about this author, Sara Mcgrath.
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