Marathe and Kate at Ryle's — "She had no skull, this woman…"
‘She had no skull, this woman. Later I am learning she had been among the first Swiss children of southwestern Switzerland to become born without a skull, from the toxicities in association of our enemy’s invasion on paper. Without the confinement of the metal hat the head hung from the shoulders like the half-filled balloon or empty bag, the eyes and oral cavity greatly distended from this hanging, and sounds exiting this cavity which were difficult to listen.’
Context
The reveal at the bottom of Marathe's Autoroute story, and the theme's definitional Concavity-birth text: Gertraude, born skull-less from the Reconfiguration's toxicities, her head "like the half-filled balloon or empty bag." The deformed births of the annular wastes — elsewhere street folklore (The Infant, the feral infants) — here get a name, a family, and a husband. The environmental crime and the love story are the same sentence. (Marathe's "Swiss" is his one-letter-thin cover for Québecois, throughout.)