She hadn't expected puppies. "Twins," the technician told her, pointing to the pair of stars blinking back from the screen. At her next appointment, a constellation appeared: nine heartbeats where there had been two, she half-expected to see a moon hanging among the delicate swirls of spines and skulls. "Huh," her doctor said. Soon after, the panting began. It seemed her tongue, an appendage she often forgot except when burnt or bitten, lengthened several inches overnight. Despite her efforts, it lolled out of the container of her mouth, escaped her lips and teeth, dangled willy-nilly. "Put that thing away," a stranger said in line at the store. "Stop it," her friends chastised. It took all she had not to lean across tables and lick clean the fingers and plates of her companions. Rebuked, she snarled. She didn't crave one particular thing, but all things: the picked over bones of rotisserie chicken, the puckered ends of sausage casings, peanut butter, cheese, sticks, grass. She grew taut with life. When the time came, she pushed aside her bed. Made space where there wasn't any before. Paced her room. She yo-yoed between worlds. In graduate school, she had read a book, erudite and elusive (dense, really) wherein the writer, a pioneer of "auto-theory," described the vexing business of labor. Vexing. That was the word. How else to describe this sensation and the slippery daisy chain of puppy-placenta-puppy-placenta that followed? What better adjective for the way her tongue, fully autonomous now, went to work on the slicks of their warm, throbbing bodies? What marvels, she marveled when the last of her litter arrived, counting them over and over as they piled together, blindly searching for her leaking breasts. What marvels, she marveled, noticing, for the first time, freckles of color on their white fur, black ticking fading to brown like a mind changing course.

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