Up the stairs, take a left, go around the corner, and enter the second blue door: that’s me. I have a narrow window, which is my greatest luxury, but besides that, I am like all the other cells in this prison. White cinder block walls bear down on the platform bed with a sagging mattress, and the smell of sweat and shit and disinfectant seeps through the door gaps. Over the years, many people have watched the sun rise and set through my window, waiting for the day when I would finish feeding, and they would be bundled out, led down the stairs and into the brown brick room where they would meet their end.

When the first bird emerged, my mother told me, “You’re a woman, now.”

My friends’ mothers had said similar things to them, but mine hadn’t cared about blood swirling in a toilet. She hardly cared when I spent a whole day kneeling on the linoleum floor and dry heaving into the toilet, until she poked her head in at the end of the night and saw the ink dark feathers floating amongst the bile.