I was born again yesterday. In the eyes of God.

Very truly I tell you, no one can enter the kingdom of God unless they are born of water and the Spirit.

He must have viewed my first birth rather poorly, then, if this is what “birth” meant. Water and the Spirit. Admission through pulverised immersion. Accepting him by the bitter taste of umbilical preserve slithering down my throat, still mixed with globs of steaming resin. Remembering the event by a keepsake, given in faith by my preacher, his imprint still pungent on my skin. And all this written over the story told by white walls in the hospital wing where my mother had died, holding me in her arms, my tiny gooey hands still grasping at her sticking hair. The solemn Children misremembered the occasion on their mission to take that bundle of red-faced, scrunched up warmth, ripely given, to God.

Then held me here for sixteen years until my day came to be saved. I was plucked out and stuffed up in the back on a van for my sequence of birth. The one that meant something to them. They stood in a circle and cut my ragged clothes, brightness closing in, from my wasting frame and held me by the armpits. Five fingertips bore into my scalp, sinking me under until my mind learnt how to swim. Gurgles echoed round the old town hall, mixing with the sculptural rhythms of boyish mass crawling from its corners in melancholic sacrament. I emerged at last, head still gripped by uncle’s wizened hand, blackened by tar and smoke and little kids he’d submerged somewhere, sometime, before.

They drove me home in silence. Shivering, uncouth in my nakedness, and dripping with water. I splattered patterns of greyish water onto the red-leathered seats of uncle’s Jaguar, stripped and cleansing. They dragged me back to my room, my legs garnished with poking wood, to carry on with my blotched scraps of Muses on the panelled floor. I was not disturbed that night. It was almost as if they knew the priest’s powers stopped at metamorphosis.

Water and the Spirit. I was full of it – spirited – but unspiritual.

Now it is morning, and I lay in a bed of moss, my head full of maggots and eyes covered in bluebottled flies. My nails are bloodied with dirt, my teeth rotted with neglect. My body is a temple of decay. I worship Her: She who gives me life. I carve into Her my gratitude and watch it fall in crimson streams, painted with my love. I worship but one other: She who lives by the coastline in her hippie frays and sun-kissed skin. My muscles beam at the hazy image of Her dancing across my closed vision on an early spring morning, when my newly blackened scalp was raw from aunts’ tormented ripping, and I had rushed to the seaside to salt my self-stoned ribs. She was washing at the edge of the water, frothy bubble wrapping her legs and reaching her thin torso in curling silver ribbons. I imagined I was the briny creature lapping at her fleshy thighs, torn and pink like the girls in Rebecca’s foreign films.

I smiled with gappy teeth, crossing my chest in subjugation to Her. She who makes me full, who gives me life in my emergence from the cocoon of sainted youth as a sooty moth among Her butterflies. She who carried me in her swollen belly and rebirthed me new and pure, a Mary made on earth. I was born again in the Valley of Berakah, a twinkle in the eyes of Her, my Lord.

“Has nothing changed, child?” uncle’s voice crackled through my revery. I looked up at him with eyes of Sodom: he was how I imagined Death might look on a bad day.

“Oh, I am quite changed, uncle.” I replied, rolling onto my chest and looking up with glistening eyes at his pale, coated form. “I have had an epiphany that I should like to become David’s concubine; I think such a life would suit me well.” I ran my tongue across his shoes, waxen with polish. 

“Wicked child!” he cried, striking me about the head with a brown-wrapped tome. A gift for my sixteenth, the same he gave to all the girls no doubt: the code of etiquette written by one of my nans. It carried instruction on how to harness my womanly wiles and prepare to serve my husband. Uncle must have thought striking me with it was the best way to enter the information into my head. After all, it would be useful if I were to be a second slave to cousin Dave.

“Polygamy is forbidden in the kingdom of God. Let you not forget, child, that Soloman was punished for his sins, as you will be punished for yours.”

“Soloman’s only punishment was too much sex. I’d take that to lying under David…” He struck me. Dizzied, I continued, “or fucking my own remains.” He struck again.

“You test my faith, child. But I shall rise above and prove to Him my faith, by finalising your conversion.”

Rough skin grasped my wrists, neck closing and heart dulling to a tasteless beat. My mind wandered back, bored of torturous monotony, to that spring morning by the coast. I saw Her laughing and dancing as my vision blurred, black spots forming to the rhythm of Her barefooted splashes and wetting legs. Head becoming heavy, I sunk back into the earth – alone at last, swallowed as satanic cyanide, scorching the land in my temptation. Her legs tangled in my head and stuck to my waist, bruising harsh-lined hips. Cold, pallid skin prickled in the eastern wind and cooling daylight, and left itself dreaming of rest in holy commune, us Children of the water, banished from the Spirit of God.