Gillian is 9 months old when her father leaves. She can only remember big ears. She sleeps through the smashing of 19 of the 20 ceramic plates in the kitchen cabinet downstairs. There's a slam and a pair of screams and an incandescent white light, then silence.

Gillian is 14 months old when she says her first word. Flushed cheeks, stocky little legs, and a pink bow tied into a gentle wisp of fine black hair, bouncing atop the lap of her single mother with ash blonde waves flowing over her shoulders. Lena, her mother, smiles and plants wet kisses all over her forehead and hugs her tight. She is healthy and happy practically swimming in her too big clothes and hair accessories. Now she remembers a set of green eyes.

Gillian is 5 years old when she moves from Chicago, Illinois to upstate New York. The backwoods beside her house sometimes hums and whispers to no one or nothing in particular. She sleeps with her mother most nights to extinguish the swell of flames that exist only in her nightmares: convulsions and screams and weirdly shaped clods of meat. Sometimes she can remember coarse-grained lips against the corner of her eye.

Gillian is 13 years old when she explodes. She's in the thicket all alone when she falls onto her back in wet soil. It's difficult to breathe when the tremors first begin, but after a minute or so she's just choking on saliva and holding back tears. The air heats up around her, or maybe it's just her skin burning up. Gillian arches her back and a split second later she detonates. It's not even a slow, grueling process for her, it's quick. Pink nuggets of flesh and tissue are strewn all over the forest, down burrows in the ground, caught in weeds, stuck to tree bark like bubble gum. Just as the wind stills, the little nuggets rumble in their spots and inch back to where Gillian once lay. Weaving into one another the pieces recreate Gillian in the soil. She's startled and bolts upright for air, coughing and wheezing all over the ground. Her mind is everywhere and anywhere at once, but she still manages to recall an Aquiline nose.

Gillian is 17 when she grows out of her black hair. It regularly lightened over the years and grew into thick henna red curls riveting down her crooked spine. She also realizes what a threat she had become and decides it best to leave and avoid endangering her mother. She packs a bag while the rest of the world sleeps and heads off to the City. By now she has completely put her father's face together.