In the Distant Past BY CARRIE FOUNTAIN Things weren’t very specific when I was in labor, yet everything was there, suddenly: all that my body had known, even things I’d only been reminded of occasionally, as when a stranger’s scent had reminded me of someone I’d known in the distant past. The few men I’d loved but didn’t marry. The time, living alone in Albuquerque, when I fainted in the kitchen one morning before work and woke up on the floor, covered in coffee. Finally. it was coming. It was all moving forward. Finally, it was all going to pass through me. It was beginning to happen and it was all going to happen in one single night. No more lingering in the adolescent pools of memory, no more giving it a little more time to see if things would get better or worse. No more moving from one place to the next. Finally, my body was all that had ever been given to me, it was all I had, and I sweated through it in layers, so that when, in the end, I was finally standing outside myself and watching, I could see that what brought me into the world was pulling you into the world, and I could see that my body was giving you up and giving you to me, and where in my body there were talents, there were talents, and where there were no talents, there would be scars.

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