We lived on the upper ledges of the Garden's humid grotto, which occasionally flooded with salted water that, on receding, left milky calcifications on the glittering mineral floor. My mother slept beside me on plush furs, from which a softly comforting muskiness rose. To what animal they belonged and how we came to have them, I do not know. I remember, however, that when I closed my eyes against the darkness, I could hear a gently beating heart coming from somewhere underneath that coarse outer fur and fluffy undercoat. An unexplained warmth also seemed to rise from it. As a child, I would lift the skins from the rock floor and look beneath it, but I saw nothing there except for the sparkle of mica and veins of clear quartz.

I grew quickly, more rapidly than human babies. And perhaps because of this, my mother was frequently absent. My smitten father would wait for her return with a quiet, anguished intensity, but she often purposely eluded him, as she did with anyone who attempted to arrest or curtail her movements. She flickered in and out of tangibility and sometimes, she would leave the faintest odor of sulfur in her wake, which, I would later learn, was the stench of hell. Much later, when her beauty withered, she admitted that she had enjoyed multiple lovers there, and it was always as hot there as she preferred it to be. She, who had been forged of fire liked to return to hell to feel its heat. Sad that her internal spark remained cruelly lit even as her physical form faded and burnt out.