Malice

Maybe God just planted a seed and paid attention. One tiny seed - pinched between plump fingertips, patted into the earth with a prayer said in an exhaled breath - the origin of the living. Then it doesn't seem so ironic that each birthed cell is identical upon conception. But what's all this God talk from a girl like me, a girl named Malice. The first lesson God taught the most primitive creatures was to breathe with gills, underwater. Fewer evolved to get lungs, so I wasn't that disappointed when I found out mine weren't completely developed when I came into the world. A month in an incubator - that further distorted the infant vision of my mother and kept me from her embrace - coaxed the tiny balloons to maturity, but left me prone to shortness of breath, and then an asthmatic. Maybe I was supposed to be a different creature altogether, and God just changed his mind at the very last minute.