Symmetrical and surgically precise are the cleanly healed cuts. It is a pharaonoic circumcision, and the shaved seamed pudenda remind me obscenely of the stitched seam down an old-fashioned football. I blink and force myself to look again, but all I can see is the absence of the flesh that should be there. I turn away, sickened, but Patsy stares, fascinated. "Doesn’t it look cool? In the interview, she says she did it to get a role. She wanted to show the producer her absolute commitment to the project. But now she loves it. She says she feels cleaner, that she has cut a lot of animal urges out of her life. When she has sex now . . .here, I can just play the interview for you-"

"No, thanks," I say faintly. I tap my master control and the screen goes completely blank. After what I have just seen, I could not bear the beauty of the rainforestcam with the wet, dripping leaves and the calling birds everywhere. I take a breath. "Patsy, you can’t be serious."

She clips her link back onto her collar and pops back onto her stool. "You know I am, Granma. I came over here to tell you about it. At least you aren’t having a meltdown like Mom did."

"She knows you want to do this?" I can’t grasp any of it, not that some women do this voluntarily, not that Patsy wants to do it, not that Katie knows.

Patsy crunches down the rest of her cookie. "She knows I’m going to do it. Me and Ticia and Samantha. Mary Porter, too. We’ll be like a circumcision group, like some African tribes had. We’ve grown up together. The ceremony will be a bond between us the rest of our lives."

"Ceremony." I don’t know when I stood up. I sit back down. I press my knees together because they are shaking. Not to protect my own genitals.

"Of course. At the full moon tonight. The midwife who does it has this wonderful setting, it’s an open field with these big old rocks sticking up out of it, and the river flowing by where you can hear it."