Keith

I was born in shit. It wasn't all of my mother's fault, either. How could she know it wasn't indigestion but rather the miracle of birth? There was but one outhouse near the cabin where they were vacationing, the moon full and glorious on this particular night. She had no problem finding the chilled rock path which led to the splintered wooden door. Her trouble only arose once the pain became so unbearable she couldn't move from the tarnished porcelain, screaming for help, which fell upon the deaf ears of my alcohol-sedated father. What I remember, and therapists would try to deny me this, is the great roaring sounds of my mother's pain booming into the earthen cesspool which was to be my birthing chamber as I fell headfirst into putrid waste and feces, tethered miraculously enough by my own umbilical cord. Dangling for an instant above the fetid mess, I turned upward, spying that moist, bruised opening which I had only just vacated through the white-rimmed circle of the toilet seat, the strangled, twisted human fabric of my lifeline emerging from there, and my mother's tortured face as her mouth gaped in horror. Now again, therapy denies me my memory, but I recall grabbing my own cord with the tiniest of fingers and pulling my new, wrinkled pink body ever upward toward that glowing circle and the glorious moonlit face of my mother. Both parents recall my birth differently, but I believe in my own perspective.