In your chart is the birth plan that you carefully hand wrote and which the nurses and the doctors will ignore because they know it impossible to plan the trajectory of a birth, let alone a life, and the sooner you learn this the saner you will be.

This short story, published in the August 2014 web issue of PANK, was a finalist for the 2014 Orlando Prize. It was also selected by Roxane Gay, New York Times bestselling author of Bad Feminist, as one of the  2015 Wigleaf Top 50 (very) Short Fiction winners. “These are stories with not a word or idea out of place,” Gay said about her picks. “These are writers who are willing to take chances and cut through flesh to show us the gleaming white of bone.” Read it here.