The jagged bite of the braided nylon cord knotted into my dark chestnut hair felt as though it were tearing my scalp directly from the cranium with every passing microsecond.
I was thirty-nine weeks pregnant, my belly swollen, taut, and dragging eighty pounds of biological mass toward the scuffed heart-pine floorboards of the second-floor master suite in Great Falls, Virginia. My calf muscles burned with a violent, lactic agony that caused my knees to tremble in spastic, uncontrollable micro-seizures. The balls of my bare feet were pressed into the cold timber, balanced in desperate, quivering elevation.
