I. Since the day I was born, I have been a queen over the lake behind my daddy’s old log cabin. It sits wedged into the mountain, as if all the snow at the top slid down one day and finally collapsed in a pool of sunburnt indifference. Daddy says that it used to be so clean that he and Mama would skip stones on the bank and watch them fall to the bottom. But, he says that since he came home from the hospital with me, the lake has been choking on matted grass and weeds, unable to breath. So he gave it to me because he couldn’t bear to look at it like this: without Mama.

II. On my ninth birthday, Daddy built me a little canoe. It was crude, made from rough-around-the-edges wood and old rusty nails. The oars gave me big splinters that I pulled out with my teeth and spit at the heads of the little snapper turtles as I passed by. Daddy let me have the boat on one condition: that I never ever EVER touch the water. He told me that if I did, I would be pulled to the bottom by evil spirits, where I would choke and die. Even then, I knew that Daddy feared death more than anything else. How did I know this? Because every night when he thought I had fallen asleep, he climbed down the rickety stairs and sat on a stump behind the house, holding three tall glass bottles. He would stare at the picture of him and Mama, tears dive-bombing onto his green glass hands. And I would close the curtains, unable to ignore the guilt that swelled in my stomach like a balloon.

III. Then I grew up. I learned to collect all three green glass bottles every morning at dawn and sail them out to the middle of my lake. I sat cross-legged in the belly of my little canoe, cramming all the worst feelings into each bottle, the ones that Daddy could never see. A bottle for my anger when he stumbled into the kitchen, falling facefirst on the ground. A bottle for my fear that Daddy wouldn’t wake up and I’d be all alone in the world. And a bottle for my guilt, convicted of murdering my Mama before even opening my eyes. One by one, I lined them up on the side of my worn-out boat with little rocks tied to their neck, and I flung them to the bottom. Execution by firing squad. Sighing, I would then float all the best qualities I could think of on lily pads at the surface: one for happiness, one for obedience, one for indifference. I painted them onto my skin until it was perfect, flawless. Porcelain.

IV. I am queen over nothing but myself. My porcelain skin has been painted over so many times in bright whites, blacks, and reds that it’s beginning to fracture, to crack. And now that I sit in a hospital bed with contractions by the minute, I know that my skin will finally break, and I won’t be able to paint over it fast enough.