New-mother child sucks in wet air, yanks her knees back and shouts. Curses like insane starlings fly at a boy standing transfixed. He has weak knees in a sterile room. One of his eyes squints as if through a surveyor’s glass of penury at her misshapen mons. Undulation like heaving soil. He forgets everything stuffed in his throat in Lamaze class. Where he’s supposed to coach, he stares. There, where he longed to be, it is transformed: an oozing, pulsing, draining fusillade of question.

A doctor or nurse -- he isn’t sure which -- elbows him to one side and barks instructions at the mother. Soon now.

There, crowning like a great, bloody mushroom at the elastomer orifice, irrevocably dilated: the beast’s head. Name all species of Agaricaceae you can imagine, Liberty cap, king boletus, Caesar’s amanita, stinkhorn, chanterelle, giant puffball, short-stem giant clitocybe, Périgord truffle, false morrel, Boletus satana. The crown of these fruits is the crown of his daughter or son, emerging there through lifefluid runlets of amniotic ichor.

He suffers a macabre harbinger, knowing that as the offspring’s torso slips free, as it rockets from the womb dragging itself, something will be horribly askew. The small beast will trail a satyr’s legs rather than lipid, smooth human skin. Below the torso, there, a fishtail, carbuncles, the sucking tendrils of some freakish bivalve. The face squeezes through, nose blasting, eyes the seams of two stitched cuts. The shoulder slips across the rubicon of an open and impossibly stretched soul valve. An arm emerges with the hand already enraged in a fist, prepared. The body of this animal slides out onto the sopping red sheets chest up, and the boy sees the genitalia, huge -- half the storming cheese-caked being’s size, it seems. It is a gyrocompass, this thing there, the cock and balls of his own son, his own little monster of trespass, iniquity latent in the birth and afterbirth of it, the very first squall that shouts me me me.

Just try and imagine it: the boy father, a man now, stands like Kronos waiting for his Zeus, lips quivering and gullet at the ready, appetite primed.

Eat it before it sins!

Eat it!

Come here, my little Zeus. Come to Daddy.