She was a medium, a fortune-teller, or an emissary sent to God himself to beg humbly that the child come whole and sound and soon. Her hands were so clean, the nails clipped or bitten, the skin dry and tight. She slept off and on, accustomed to resting when she could in a bed or chair, like a traveler crossing the frontier between tragedy and comedy, land forever claimed by both sides. What she witnessed was the opposite of drowning, a reenactment of the moment the first amphibian took a breath, the tadpole of a child swimming eagerly into her hands.
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