JA Thea, Dunedin

My knees poke out of the bath like islands, godlike heads lifted from the sea. The water is murky with dead soap and dead skin. Soon there will be eddies from the pull of the drain, slurping down the sea like the lips of a fat man, merry face.

My feet are baby-born-slime-tender as they step, wet, out onto wooden floors. I resent them: their clumsiness. They can never keep up, they always tear as they scramble over oyster crusted rocks. I look to the rest of my small body as I dry; coconut milk folds of skin and flesh around my bones. Like my skin is paper. Like if I get too close to a fire I’ll ignite, curl in on myself, my features melting. Marshmallows on sticks, gather my siblings to watch their little sister burn.

Come boys. Fetch the kettle. We’ll make hot chocolate.

My brothers like hot chocolate.

Its sweetness makes my throat ache.

But I drink it anyway.

I pull a dress over my head. It’s light fabric, bright yellow, and pinches through the shoulders, reminders of all the other little girls who have worn it before me. We got here first. Sneering, twirling. I imagine their feet. They would have been nice, callouses thick and sturdy. They would have been nimble, strong. They would have scurried over rocks by the shore with ease. You can tell a lot about a person from their feet. They are sacred. They connect all that we are to all that the world is.

I smooth the yellow material down to my knees and watch my toes, kitten pads, make damp tracks down our hall. Mum’s asleep in the sheep-skin-draped armchair in the living room. It smells like onions. Mum’s face resembles a cliff. Her lips are drawn down at the corners, weighted by thoughts or gravity. There are new lines between her eyebrows, too. Arrows pointing to the ground. Or the sky? My brothers don’t seem to notice these changes to her face. They tell her to rest. The baby, they say. Everyone notices that, her belly swollen and bloated with promises of a boy. But promises are only words.

I think they’re wrong. I think it’ll be a girl. Like me.

Maybe she’ll have feet like mine.

The wind is coming from the other side of the house. The door doesn’t bang shut behind me as I breeze outside. It slumps like a limp thing on its hinges.

It’s summer. You would almost mistake summer for peaceful if you saw this scene in a photo or through a window or from one of those little planes that echo through the clouds above. You would never see how vulnerably we balance on the peak of this hill, green and brown and grey, grass and dirt and stone. A small house with curvaceous walls like that of a bird nest, spit and dirt. Four tiny figures like dolls. A mother. Two sons. A daughter. Another on the way.

I hear the land breathe. The hills look like pregnant women, lying, floating in the waves, their bellies reaching for the stars, their young longing to leave this land, leave the dirt and ground and fly. Maybe Mum won’t give birth to a boy or a girl. Maybe in her belly is a thing with wings. I wonder whether it will take me with it to touch the sun.

Or melt. I smile. I sit. I wait for life.