EFLEDA SLIPPED FROM HER MOTHER IN A TWILIGHT FOG, hair dark and a squall to rival the waves. The ease of her birth became a frequent story, a boast for parents to tell at parties.
“We were driving,” her mother would say, eyes glittering, bouncing Efleda on a hip, a knee, stroking her cheek as she slept in a bejeweled bassinet, “and we thought we’d make it, but she was too quick for us!”
She would raise a glass, bubbles drifting toward the surface, and toast her daughter, and stroke the girl’s hair, laying it flat so as to kiss the dark, smoothed run. And the guests would laugh, and smile, and nod agreeably, as if they knew something they had not before.
In this way, the edges of the narrative blurred, the years softening, rosy and fabricated in their recount.
A peculiar practice of Efleda’s parents, something to which they would remain affixed so long as the girl was small, was to have Efleda always nearby: at a party, on an outing, by a sickbed. They kept her close, but never really did they speak to her, and not often was she held. Assign it to the nerves of a first child, or increasingly as the years passed, to what was becoming clear would be their only, and in the way most things were precious so too was Efleda, not for some particular trait or the merits of personality, but for her rarity, as artifact, an insect in amber resin best examined against the light.
The real story: a vacation, some exquisitely out-of-the-way place to which one must helicopter, to which her parents did, the gem replete with linen napkins, oil-rich soaps, brushed teak decks overlooking the ocean. Efleda’s mother, hugely pregnant, and her father, hugely proud, sat together at three-course dinners and ate at the pace of those accustomed to luxury. They were in love, aglow, but then a sudden pain a month too soon, and helicopters did not fly in fog.
They borrowed the innkeeper’s car, drove until they could no longer, found themselves at a piney pullout, the headlights cutting a white soup over the fog-socked road. Her father turned the wheel, gravel distinct under the tires, and her mother pounded the seat, dust plumes rising, pull over, pull over, she’s coming.
In the place Efleda first became Efleda (to be: a separation), sandstone sprung up from the sea, holes as big as caves, its surface etched in gridded rivulet, the cliffs lacelike and mottled. Alien enough, this rock, that one might think it diseased were it not for the gentleness of the wear, the soft curve of each edge, would-be crags burnished in the
