She smiles at me from a wall in the living room and I remember that she was born with gray eyes. I don’t know her father anymore. We have not spoken for years. And sometimes I wonder if he still believes he was crazy when he signed away his rights to her. I know I wasn’t. That was the sanest I have ever been. Sometimes I’m scared she has inherited bad things from my line. What is even more frightening? That I don’t know his line at all. He is lost somewhere, beyond memory. But there will come a day when she will wonder. She understands where her eyes come from, and I can tell her why she darkens like caramel in the summer sun. But I can’t explain her straight hair. I don’t know if I will have the heart to tell her the truth. I didn’t care for him, not in a real way. I was horney and facinated and free of my maidenhood. I thought it was my right, at sixteen, to dare the nature of my maturation to succeed after sucessive attempts. My clan is a fertile bunch, and we birth well.

There are memories from the day of her conception that still linger. I don’t know why they stick in my brain like peanut butter , but I can smell the scent of his sex on my skin, even now. We did it on the floor of my living room. I don’t know where the dog was, but Panther was outside, near the front door. I skipped school on purpose. It was a hasty venture, clumsy and unrefined.

It became the most trying year of my life, up to that point. A fight brought out the truth of my condition. I knew before I knew, if that makes sense. I had become very aware of my body, the blossoming breasts and the chaotic moodswings were just the icing.

I remember flying back, three days after I named her for my mother. I was swollen, from crying and from the water weight. My soul had shed the skin of youth, and I was a new born adult mourning her child.

She is ten now. Blossoming into a sweet young woman. One day I will tell her the truth I feared telling her mother. For now I indulge her need to know with gentle truths. There is time enough for the rest.