Diary of a Seed
Sacrifices Things were always flying about Rickie’s head when she was a baby. Her mother complained on the day of her birth that too many flies were present in that patch of the woods they’d chosen, where she squatted over the bed of banana leaves upon which Rickie was meant to make her earthside debut. The midwife had told her to focus on her breathing, for disrupting the energetic alignment they’d so carefully worked toward over the past nine months would do more harm than the flies could. Rickie’s mother insisted that Rickie’s aunt had not followed her instructions for how to age the leaves and sent her to the house to retrieve more. By the time she returned, Rickie was born. The next day, a butterfly found its way from the garden, through the second floor window and onto Rickie’s forehead in her crib. Butterflies were long out of season by then, a fact all witnesses from that day agree on. What was harder to settle was Rickie’s mother’s memory that every window in the house was closed that day. A few days after that Rickie was stung on the forehead by a bee, and it was at this point that her mother declared too many flying things drawn to a child in her first days as a bad omen. So Rickie was used to feeling like a curse. In a way, she found satisfaction from the thing within her that unsettled people, whatever it was. From the day she was born she unsettled her mother; posing a threat just by existing, with 59
