Editor’s Note: The following is excerpted, with permission, from Pretty: A Memoir by KB Brookins. The book, out May 28 from Alfred A. Knopf, blends prose and poetry.
Before the Texas heat could cut through bodies like glass, there was a nighttime breeze. My mother felt a rumble in her belly that sent her hurling over a toilet seat—gunks of upchuck getting stuck in her hair. Sure, she’d gotten food poisoning or a bug that upset her stomach before, but this rumble was different. It stayed often; it felt unprecedented for her still-growing, seventeen-year-old body, so she hurried to get a pregnancy box from the pharmacy that is now an apartment complex.
