“He looked at the girl, and she gazed at the floor. She was a shy, quiet child. "She will be beautiful when she grows up," he said. And thus, it started. The age of the label, the pursuit of the pretty. That memory stayed with her all her life – it felt like a mythic prophecy, the definition of the woman she was going to be, everything she should aspire to.”

Her mother bought her a tall can of aerosol. When she pressed the button the temperature of the tin suddenly dropped, the cold spread through her hand then the release of the powdery floral smell. She flinched involuntarily as the spray hit her tender skin. She choked on the fumes when she sprayed too much, which was often as she was now aware of the cardinal sin of being “smelly”.

During her 20s, the girl learned various defence mechanisms. She started to dress more conservatively. She would be reserved until she could scope out new men coming into the business. Like the one who called himself "the big swinging dick" and asked her if "she liked to shop."

The medication was too much for her body. Her ovaries became over-stimulated. By the time she lay down for the operation to have the eggs removed, she had 18 fully ripened in her abdomen, each the size of a large grape. She was swollen, sick. She sat on her backstep the night before, breathing in the winter air, feeling suffocated by her own body, reduced to a walking womb, a robot coded with one instruction, “I must have a child.”

In the first image the woman pulls up her nose to show the long hairs inside her nostrils, some clustered together, glued with mucus. Her nose tip is squished causing the skin to ridge and her crow's feet to pop. Her lower lip is pulled down exposing her crooked teeth. A silvery trail of spit is traced across the black chasm of her mouth to her protruding tongue.

She had taught her child to speak with that tongue.