3

3

T he moment Iris emerged into this world and the closest nurse finagled the squealing baby onto Flora's chest, a thought grabbed Flora by the throat—

I would step in front of a train for this creature

—and squeezed. Flora didn't have words for the feeling. She might have said "love," but suddenly that word was meant for greeting cards or lazy afternoons in bed, legs tangled and plans forgotten. It didn't get close to this. What she had now, with this impossibly tiny human on her naked chest, was primal.

She remembered a day in her late teens when she joined her father by the chiminea on their deck. It must have been fall; she could just start to see her breath in the air. She was watching the flames overtake a thick log as her father talked about the book he was reading on quantum entanglement. The idea that a split atom's two parts could communicate through time and space. If one was affected, the other was, too, even miles away.

At the time, it was an anecdote. But now, it was her whole existence.

The cells of her body had formed another body that was now exposed to the world, and she knew that she would never stop fighting for that body as if it were still her own.

If those cells died, then her cells died.

Nothing had ever made more sense.