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when they’re freshly shaved.
    You’ve got to peel the brown shell off the pit. To do that I stick my thumbnail into the shell and keep cracking it. Just be careful not to let any pieces of the shell jab under your nail.
    That hurts and it’s hard to get the pieces out even with a needle and tweezers. And trying to finish ripping open the shell with splinters under your nail hurts worse than the initial pain of them getting jammed in there in the first place. It’ll leave ugly bloody marks under your nail, too. The blood doesn’t stay red, either. It turns brown. It takes a long time for it to grow out. In the meantime your nail looks like a sheet of floating ice with a piece of driftwood frozen into it. Once the shell’s completely removed you can see the pleasant color of the pit—either light yellow or sometimes pale pink.
    Then I hit it with a hammer. But not so hard that it crushes. After that I put it in the freezer for a few hours to simulate winter. Once you’ve had enough of winter, you pull it out and insert three toothpicks into the pit. Then you suspend it in water in a glass, using the toothpicks to hold it at the right height.
    An avocado pit looks like an egg. It’s got a thick, round end and a more pointed end. The narrower end has to stay above the water. About a third in the air and two-thirds submerged. It’ll stay this way for a couple of months.
    A slimy film grows on the part of the pit in the water. I find it very inviting. Sometimes I take the pit out of the water and put it inside me. I call it my organic dildo. Obviously I only use organic avocados for my starter pits. Otherwise I’d end up with toxic trees.
    You definitely want to take the toothpicks out before you put it inside you. Thanks to my well-trained pelvic muscles I can shoot it back out afterward. Then it’s back into the water with the toothpicks stuck back in. And then you wait.
    After a couple of months you’ll see a crack in the round end. It’ll get wider, a deep crevice in the pit. It looks as if it’s about to split in half; then a thick, white, taproot will start to grow out of the bottom. It curls into the bottom of the glass—there’s no other direction for it to grow. Once that gets pretty long, if you look closely at the crack on the top side of the pit, you’ll see a tiny green sprout starting to grow. Now’s the time to transfer it to a pot full of potting soil. Soon a stem grows with big, green leaves.
    I’ll never get closer to giving birth than this. I looked after that first pit for months. Had it inside me, pushed it out. And I take perfect care of all the avocado trees I’ve started that way.
    As far back as I can remember, I always wanted to have a child. There’s a recurring pattern in my family. My great-grandmother, my grandmother, my mother, and me. Allfirst-born. All girls. All neurotic, deranged, and depressed. But I broke the cycle. This year I turned eighteen and I’ve been waiting for that moment. One day after my birthday—as soon as I didn’t need parental approval—I had myself sterilized. Since then the thing my mother says to me so often doesn’t sound so threatening: “How much do you want to bet that when you have your first child it’s a girl?” Because I’ll only be having avocado trees. Apparently you have to wait twenty-five years for a tree to bear fruit. Which is also about how long you have to wait to become a grandmother. These days.
    While I’ve been lying here thinking happily about my avocado family, the pain has subsided. You always notice when it begins; but you don’t notice when it stops. That moment doesn’t grab your attention. But I realize the pain is completely gone now. I love painkillers and try to imagine what it would have been like to have been born in another era when there were no good painkillers. My head is free of pain and now there’s room for everything else. I take a few deep breaths and, exhausted, fall asleep. When I open my eyes I