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Few know that David was not Yuna’s first husband. Fewer know that Shane was not Yuna’s first child. For nine months a baby girl was moored to Yuna, navel to navel. The light of the civil world was a migrainous change from the dim and flesh colored walls in which she bloomed. Her birth was taxing on everyone in the obstetric unit, an air of unease in the room postpartum.
As she was inspected in front of reflective metal, if she had the ability to, she would have recognized that, beneath the viscera coating her body head to toe, her head was horribly misshapen. Her cranium lacked the fullness associated with a large, developed brain. To say that Yuna and her husband were not strikingly, painfully aware of this defect previously would be incorrect, but the concept of eugenics felt like a rink she’d certainly never won a Stanley cup on.
When she was handed back to them, clean and intoxicatingly aromatic to Yuna, she came with a question. Yuna grasped an infantile hand and traced its knuckles idly. Anencephaly was a fate etched on stone with a high carat diamond. Any life preserving efforts would remain life preserving as long as the machines whirred and on Yuna’s scale, the option of a fleeting but comfortable life weighed heavier.
For four days Yuna knew a daughter. On the fifth day, the anencephaly took her ability to breathe. She knew Yuna and she knew chaos as quickly as she didn’t; she was unmoored.