Hannah is sixteen, and she sees her friends begin to change their bodies. Nature has already given them breasts and hips, periods and pubic hair. Now they metamorphose on their own terms.

Taylor walks in the first day of school with her hair cropped close to her skull. Jen’’s cheeks hollow amidst rumors that she eats only lemon wedges and chia seeds. Isabel lifts her shirt in the locker room to reveal a mildly infected rose blooming in the small of her back.

Hannah’s hair is long, her skin unpierced. Her cheeks are round with puppy fat. She eats pot roast and knishes and potato pancakes cooked by a woman whose hair was once shaved, whose bones were once visible, whose wrist still bears the number tattooed on her wrist so many years ago.

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She thought she would give birth in a world where Hawaii had been swallowed by the ocean where bear skeletons littered Arctic seabeds where sharks snapped in the watery remains of Miami.

She thought she would have to feed her child in a world of plastic soil and toxic fruits of burning rainwater, acid rivers of garbage islands in browning seas.

She thought she would raise her child in a world of a thousand new Atlantises of lands without seasons of barely-remembered snow.

Instead she gives birth in a world where electricity still hums where supermarkets still stand where snow falls gently outside hospital windows.

She is too young, the baby is too early, but the world has not ended yet.

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