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MAIREAD CASE

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her sternum. If Tiny’s breast was a clock, her thumb would mark ten o’clock to midnight, again and again. Sometimes her thumb cramps. This is one kind of thinking. Tiny thinks about the soldiers who cut off their breasts so they could shoot arrows more accurately. In this way, they would always be soldiers. It might be like being a parent. Both situations are also physical facts that affect a person’s ability to feed and eat, to work and travel. They affect how we are in the world, irreversibly. Where is the soft dent in your stomach. Why is that red line on your chest.

Tiny thinks this way when she misses her mother, who died when Tiny was a toddler. In science, Tiny read that babies are born with three hundred bones in their bodies, only those bones don’t start growing until the second trimester. So when Tiny’s chest formed, she was closer to being her mother than not. Babies are parasites first. Tiny used to be a blob. She remembers freckles on her mother’s arms, but Tiny isn’t sure if she remembers them from photos or actually being held. This city is too cold and gray for freckles. Tiny’s mother lived in another place when she was little. Before Tiny was born, after it, and even now in death, Tiny’s mother tells her daughter that she is a brilliant and strong person, resourceful and capable of absolutely everything life presents her. Tiny is a helper, not a fool, and that is a fact written in stars. Stars exist, even when people can’t see them. Sometimes, planes are mistaken for stars, but stars exist. Stars exist.