00 Prologue: The First Pulse

from Three Moons in My Ribcage

They say the first sound I ever heard was my mother’s heartbeat.
But they are wrong.
I heard the moon scratching at her spine long before that.

I was not born. I was unsealed.
Unfurled like a letter no one remembers writing,
addressed to a future that should not exist.
The womb was warm, yes, but not kind.
It trembled. It whispered. It glowed with silver things
that had no names, only pulses.

Before I could think, I remembered.
Not in words. Not in sense.
In ache.
In three throbs buried beneath my ribs
where no organ belongs.
Three circles spinning in a darkness deeper than blood.

One hummed lullabies in a voice that was not mine.
One blinked slowly, like a god pretending to sleep.
The last did not move.
It watched.

And in the womb, I learned to lie still.
To keep my limbs tight.
To pretend I was not aware of the thing curling inside my chest
like a third lung made of glass and dust.

They cut the cord, but they did not free me.
The moons stayed.
They lodged themselves between my bones
like forgotten truths
and waited for the world to break me open
so they could rise.

I cried, but not for air.
I cried for the silence that had ended.
For the voices I’d now have to hear
without the amniotic curtain between us.

My mother looked down and called me beautiful.
She did not know what I had smuggled into this world.
She did not know the moons had names.
That they would grow teeth.

She did not know
that I had already begun to forget how to be human.

And I did not have the mouth yet
to warn her.