After I ate my siblings in Mother's womb, she asked the tengu to pry me out and bury me under a mountain. The tengu pulled, my head a slick and dented sphere between their long claws. I popped out, fists strangling the umbilical cord, legs kicking with the strength of three—my sister's calves she once used to stretch and probe Mother for length, my brother's thighs that held Mother wide so I could unfold my arms and search for an exit. How strong and sturdy, the tengu marveled. Any longer and she'd have eaten through you, they said. They left Mother in a puddle of amniotic fluid and blood, a watery halo splattered around her abdomen, her eyes closed, her breaths light like she'd gone decades without rice to plant her upright. Her hand rested over her winter melon stomach, pulsing from residual sweat, ready to empty onto a cutting board, ten thousand seeds for ten thousand sons, the remaining shell hollowed and dried as an ornamental gourd. The tengu dug me a hole beneath the mountain where I latched onto roots of ginseng trees, pulling them like hairs rooted to scalps. The soil loosened, quaked, collapsed in dust storms that chased the tengu into the sky where they subsumed smoke and burning biomass, climbing the atmosphere faster than I could reach. When Mother woke with a change of heart, I had already eaten the rocks, leaves, soil; the surrounding crows, worms, rabbits; the water, oxygen, nitrogen. She held me in the bundle like rice pudding studded with longan, distanced from her chest else it might crumble as daughters often do. I latched onto her brittle finger. Unable to pry me away from the roots, she waited for the Ginseng trees to rot from above.


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