I know I was never born; that I have existed forever. It is why I have brought her here.

She has come willingly because of my overwhelming innocence and…as she thinks of it, as they all think of it…naïvete. What they have never understood is that thewonder I express comes from holding reality up to the light and scrutinizing it for what it really is. What they have never understood is the light itself. Death is our preoccupation, we the deceivers of ourselves.

I told her she was a liar, the worst kind, deluding herself. I told her as I tied the belts around her wrists and, against her manufactured struggles, lashed her off at the fence posts, just wide enough to stretch the muscles, elegant contours along her long sleek limbs. The stirrups are homemade, but sufficient for the task. She twists against her restraints, not disappointing me with the pretense; the symbolism is exquisite.

I invite her, not for the first time, to accuse me of contradiction, dichotomy, but she refuses. Because of my innocence, I am allowed my "fantasies."

Calming the motion of her bare belly with my hand, I proceed to tell her about the freshly laid eggs. When first I ate one whole and uncooked, the fragmenting shell cut my youthful lips. Life unborn, I tell her. How pure is that? Unspoiled. Undiluted. Or is that undeluded?

The first glimpse of doubt now as her innocent, naïve, trusted lover draws the blade from where it has lain superficially buried, more figuration, in the hay and loose earth. Still, we have played our games before; the death game comes to mind, where I pretend I am a corpse so that I may show her how fiercely the light shines even when we are reduced to that physical state. She always indulges me, not knowing that my heartbeat has truly stopped, and forgets, at last, how peculiar she thinks the sport as I lift her to the crescendo and fountain that so represents the misguided thirst for animal consciousness. For these are the processes that ensure the whole race of men is a race of madmen, while its members know it not.

The fading shadow of concern, and the materializing smile, as I draw not the keen side of the blade, but the back of it, across her midsection, marking the spot. Is this the way? I ask her. Or better here? As I touch the moist crevice whose function it is to spill forth the graduate of the fetal waters. But I already know: the damage is greater from below; indeed the potential to extinguish the light, very real. Nevertheless, we must not abandon the ritual of birthing.

She squirms as I tease the spur, clever little garden of nerves that it is. Her legs relax as I pause to bask in a scented wind off a coming afternoon storm.

"Please," she breathes.

I touch there again. But my words carry into deeper realms. "Push," I invite her. "I will give you that chance."

"Chance?" she manages in a slight gasp.

"Chance to bring it forth in the traditional way."

"It? Is this some new game? Are we pretending I am pregnant?"

"You are pregnant."

"Don’t snap. I’ll play."

Yes, you’ll play. I caress her soft skin and imagine how smooth her offspring’s will be. Like the unborn egg. It is fitting that we have come here, to my mother’s home, where I was never really born on the kitchen floor, in a pool of fluids, the woman who carried me experiencing her last hour in agony, writhing in the delusion of our lunatic minds.

"Push," I command. And as the noise comes out of her nostrils flared in amusement and carnal curiosity, I remember that face.

My mother’s sister, in whose house I was brought up, wore that face the first time she caught me fully exposed. I was on my bed, a bible before me, tearing out the pages of Genesis one by one, stuffing them in my mouth, ingesting them.

"Like the mother’s milk you never had?" she suggested. And then she began to tell me, in greater detail than she ever had before, about my birth, shedding layers of clothing as she did, until she stood before me nude. My wonder made her laugh.

"You’re still so amazed?" she said. "We’ve been doing this for a long time."

So we had. But the fluids had been ours and ours alone until that day.

At the funeral, which ritual I alone attended, I put a whole hen’s egg in her mouth, a perfecting gleam to her still lascivious rictus.

"Push!" I demand of the woman before me. This time I will have it. This time I will not be tricked. This time my appetite will be satisfied.

I look up at her face. It is distorted by her desire to please me, yet I know I must enter her and find it myself. We can never trust them, these mothers; they are the doorways into this game of lunacy that is earthly existence. They defy the whole idea of perpetuity.

Her eyes are closed as I lift the knife. A strained high-pitched sound now as she puts her all into the exercise--but what’s this?

A sudden light along the edge of the blade...

I look down to see it coming out of her, wrapped in brilliance.

Without hesitation, I cradle the egg in my hands, take it into my mouth, catch its mother’s eyes as she cranes forward to observe more closely.

I recognize something there, in her face, in her eyes, as she watches me begin to chew.

She believes all of it a game.

I, on the other hand, know it’s a game.