I can't tell you who my mother is because I don’t know where she is. She disappeared somewhere between my birth and the first time I cried. It's possible that I was born to a memory. She must have slipped through the air ducts or out the open window which wasn't much help on that blistering July afternoon when I was born. Everyone who came in to see me was in a foul mood from the heat. And maybe that's why I've never been too popular with my family. But either no one noticed my mother's exit, or they all helped her go. As much as they don't like me they really hated her. Now I've had to be some kind of bloodhound, sniffing the earth to discover the many pathways my mother took me before she was born. Even before I was conceived, I lived inside of her. I was with her when she would shoplift at the strip-mall. I was there when she let the Adams boy become a man. I was even there the morning when she hurt the neighbor's dog. People made excuses, but inside their homes they feared her. They branded her with every letter of the alphabet. But one thing that I knew was that she didn’t care what they thought. Even at the earliest stage, my mother liked to talk to me. She would narrate the things that she wanted to do. Nothing she wanted was ever good, and nothing she wanted was ever clean. It wasn't her style. She would tell me years before I was born that this was the legacy that she would pass down to me. She told me that the world was something made of spikes, and everyone would want me full of holes. It was our job to kick the teeth of the world and break the spikes in two. Punch the people who would like to see us dead. Nothing ever killed her but her own two trembling hands. Small hands. Small girl. But small only described her from her head to her toes. Otherwise she was a giant. When she walked the streets of our town, the street lights would shake. The people would echo the street lights by shaking their heads at her. There were too many vertebrae in the back of her neck for her to lift her chin any higher. Her pride was famous. Everything on her was attached even if it all rattled when she ran. And that's exactly what she did when I was born. Everyone placed bets on my eventual demise. They could see her in my eyes even before they were open. When my hair grew and my arms got long and my legs were the spindly legs of a ballerina, they still saw me as short and angry like her. They couldn't accept that I was taller than she was. My mother was a runner but I was a dancer. My mother found a lane and didn’t leave it. But I moved in circles. Pirouettes. I wanted to be higher in the air, not trapped in my body. My mother emptied everything from her brain and replaced it with smoke and poison. But I made my brain a performance. An endless dance. I hit my marks. I never missed a cue. I have the discipline to do every single position on the barre, but the only position my mother knew was flat on her back trying to find the wallet in his pants that were bunched up around his ankles while he pinned her to the motel floor.