As children, we circled the crow chick that fell from its nest. Its wings were splayed heavenward like a saint’s, its brains streaked like veins of quartz across asphalt. Its neck arched back at a fossil-like, impossible angle.

That was when I learned how fragile birds’ bones are, hollow and light as breath. Shattered by even a careless touch.

• • • •

They are tiny things, wet and bent, as black and as slick with the wet of birth as her hair. Monitors and nurses’ murmurs fade as I cup her to me. I do not touch them, even though my hands shake so hard that IV needles tug against my sore veins.

After she eats, she sleeps on my chest, curled like a snail.

Instead of stroking her back, my thumbs trace gentle arcs around crow-dark down, still waxy and plastered to her skin. Her wings are tucked tight, each feather as perfectly shaped as the buds of her fingernails.

They need to weigh and measure her.

“Don’t put her on her back!” I cry.

They place her on the scale with her elbows and knees tucked into her chest, as if she were still inside me.

I don’t let them swaddle her.

For months I had scrolled and clicked, building the registry with swaddles and organic cotton sleep sacks patterned with tiny ducklings. Breathability doesn’t matter anymore.

All I see are the crow chick’s wings, shattered by its fall.

I am unhooked and unpierced and placed in a wheelchair. She is still on my chest when they abandon us to the recovery room and night nurse choreography. Vitals, ibuprofen, Tylenol, have you had a bowel movement? My husband answers for me. He is there, I think. She is still on my chest.

At night, time dies.

I watch her open her eyes in the glow of the nurse’s monitor, the slow black blinks. I watch her puckered pink mouth part, her scant wakefulness swallowed by sleep. I draw a blanket over her diaper and legs, curving it up over her bent arms, avoiding her wings.

• • • •

“I love how she’s always skin-to-skin,” the nurse chirps, bright with the beginning of a shift. “Good job, mama.”

White light. Throbbing skull. Mother’s milk tea is wet dead grass. Ibuprofen, vitals. Use the ice pack in your underwear. The bleeding is normal.

They won’t let us leave until we complete a tedious curriculum. Breastfeeding diagrams blur. Something about the number of diapers per day.

Do not fall asleep with them in the bed. Do not fall asleep with them on the couch. Do not, under any circumstances, let them sleep on their stomachs. They sleep too deeply. They forget to breathe.

Her down has dried. Thousands of gray-black feathers flutter with each of my quickening heartbeats.

• • • •

At home, no clothes or swaddles touch her wings. She stays in my arms, nursing, or curled beneath my collarbones.

She must sleep on her back or she will die, but she cannot lay on her wings. Weight would thread the delicate bones with a thousand veins, a thousand fractures reaching and spreading and splintering.

On my chest, she is safe.

Sleep scratches across my eyes. I dream of a bassinet, gilded by late afternoon, its mattress speckled with shattered eggshells and scattered down.

I yank myself upright from the couch cushions, arms tightening around her. Her mouth breaks with sharp and fearful mews.

• • • •

I don’t allow anyone to touch her. At first, my husband stays awake with me, but he fades. His pallor takes on the pattern of the comforter—paisley, pale blue. First his limbs vanish, then his chest. He becomes a figment of the corner of the eye; I alone face the nights that watch me like crows on a fence, gleaming and ever watchful.

Invisible hands try to take her and smother her in sheets. I jerk upright, pawing the rumbled blankets, but she is here, slipping from my chest. Falling away, away, away . . .

I catch her before she shatters. I clutch her to me, her cheek sweaty against the hollow of my throat.

She sleeps on, undisturbed by the thundering of my pulse.

• • • •

Dawn comes buttery and flush with birdsong from the open window.

Her yawn begins with mouth and wizened face, then ripples through her back. To her wings.

They spread. Stretch; reach their apex with a tremble; relax.

I imagine a beat of her wings, and another, and another. I imagine her lifting from my chest, flying to the window and out and vanishing, my arms—impotent, exhausted, leaden—too heavy to act. Too late. Gone.

But instead: the weight of her skull tilts her head back, her face turns upward.

Her eyes open, oil-slick dark and unfocused. In their wetness, the gleam of a world unborn.

They find me.

And I am not alone.