Mario's birth and body
He had to be more or less scraped out, Mario, like the meat of an oyster from a womb to whose sides he’d been found spiderishly clinging, tiny and unobtrusive, attached by cords of sinew at both feet and a hand, the other fist stuck to his face by the same material. He was a complete surprise and terribly premature, and withered, and he spent the next many weeks waggling his withered and contractured arms up at the Pyrex ceilings of incubators, being fed by tubes and monitored by wires and cupped in sterile palms, his head cradled by a thumb.
Context
The birth itself, on the brownstone stairs in the seventh month of a pregnancy Avril never showed: nativity as horror rendered as tenacity — he clings. This is the theme's founding body, and its vocabulary (withered, the Pyrex incubator, the fist stuck to the face) is re-used almost item for item, blackened, for the dead-infant speaker's stillborn son at 079.