Born without a skull in the toxified southwest

texture · UNDATED (before the rescue; see Dating notes)

• When: UNDATED — her birth, placed by Marathe's account "among the first" skull-less births of the toxified southwest; the account's own chronology does not add up cleanly (Dating notes)
• What: Gertraude was born without a skull. In Marathe's bar-story version (every Québec noun transposed to "Switzerland" — attribution note below), 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" — that is, in the transposition, among the first skull-less children of southwestern Québec, blamed on the toxic fallout of the experialist gifting that made the Great Concavity/Convexity. Without her containing metal helmet, "the head hung from the shoulders like the half-filled balloon or empty bag, the eyes and oral cavity greatly distended from this hanging". One narrated corroboration reaches the reader outside the bar story: on the desert shelf, watching Steeply smoke, Marathe recalls that when his wife was born without a skull "there had been at first suspicion that the cause was that her parents smoked cigarettes as a habit" — a first-guess etiology the toxicity account displaces. [Attribution note: the "Swiss" material is Marathe's own account, told drunk to Kate Gompert on 14 Nov YDAU; the smoking-suspicion beat is narrated through Marathe's focalization. No version of her origin reaches the reader except through him.]