Labor
Lucy Zhang
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A son who thinks himself a spider tries to save itself from the jaws of a Venus flytrap. To have a second chance at life, legs crushed between teeth, guts half digested? I would never eat my baby, like I would never trap him in a degrading placenta. I’d usher him out as the next world’s savior, evil conqueror, chosen hero destined to quiet the quaking that ripples through uterine muscles. This ancient pain comes from the dragon deity carving a baby’s fate into a mountain. The more the pain, the larger the mountain, the greater the fate. My vibrating limbs wait for the deity’s lightning to shock them into stillness. When my grip snaps through the most rigid of tortoiseshell hairpins, a harbinger of misfortune for generations, the dragon stamps my son’s cries into the mountain, from summit to valley. Should it reassure me that he will outlast a spider? It only takes a moment to etch his fate, but the moment stretches on—part of the misfortune I brought upon myself and future, unmade daughters. The dragon whispers that it must first weave a net to warm all babies covering Earth before it can provide relief.
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Lucy Zhang writes, codes, and watches anime. Her work has appeared in Virginia Quarterly Review, Shenandoah, The Massachusetts Review, and elsewhere. Find her at https://lucyzhang.tech.
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Posted in Mardi Gras Microfiction Contest: March Feb '26 and tagged in #boudin, #microfiction