Prologue

All the stories agree that the day I was born was an auspicious day. The common consensus was that the stars aligned themselves into patterns that told of good fortune, that the full moon was brighter than usual as it shone down declaring the birth of a miracle into the world. According to the 'expert theologians' of the St. Sophia church that chronicled the event, you could almost hear the heavens themselves sing their approval and happiness as the baby Sophia was born into this world to become the salvation of all humanity. According to them I slipped from my mother womb with barely any effort because I was destined to only heal and never cause pain. I was welcomed into the loving arms of my French mother Jacqueline and my father who wasn't important enough to mention. It is a beautiful story, but like most of the stories told by these 'theological experts' it couldn't have been further from the truth.

I was actually born in the midst of one of the worst snowstorms to ever hit St Petersburg Russia in centuries. The violent storm had been causing havoc for nearly three days and the whole city was buried in several inches of snow. The public hospital was swamped because of the blizzard and the staff just couldn't keep up. It looked more like a warzone than a public hospital as the rooms started to fill up and the desperate doctors started to treat emergency cases right there in the hallway. Since it was either that or let the people die, they said screw the regulations and did what they could for the injured.

In the midst of all this chaos, I was being delivered by an overworked intern who had not slept in a while and was running on fumes and coffee . The midwife was unavailable because he was snowed in and couldn't make it to the hospital, leaving the only other available staff , an intern, to do the delivery. The intern tried to remember all the facts that he knew about delivering babies and tried to help as much as possible as my mother started to scream in pain when the contractions started.

After three hours of labor , my mother's drug ravaged body just couldn't take the stress anymore and went into shock. Her organs started to fail one by one and she died before the intern could do anything. In the end the poor intern had to make the decision to cut into the dead body of my mother to take me out before I suffocated. That was how I was really born, dragged out of the corpse of my mother while I bathed in her blood.

As for my loving family, my mother was a Chechen immigrant who immigrated to Russia in search of a good future. She was a beautiful woman so she believed that she would at least get a good husband to take care of her, but like most naive girls that come to a big city she fell in with the wrong type of people and got addicted to drugs. To fuel her growing addiction she started turning tricks, until she finally ended up being a prostitute full time. She worked around the seedier bars in downtown St. Petersburg where her pretty face made her quite popular. As for my father I assume he was one of her many customers, I never found out who he was. Frankly I never cared enough to look for him.

In conclusion I was born with no family to a mother who was a prostitute, during a blizzard that was later labeled one of the worst natural disasters to ever hit Russia, at a hospital that was so crowded that there were people lying on the floor bleeding out while their loved ones begged the people around them for help. I was delivered by an inexperienced intern who had to hack through my own mother's dead body to get me out , baptized in her blood. Not quite the idyllic story the 'theological experts' told. But then again it wasn't the kind of story you want to tell if you want to inspire devotion and piety. People rarely want to hear the ugly truth, they would rather hear a beautiful lie.

Continuing on with my story , by the time the poor intern was able to extricate me from the mess that used to be my mother, he was severely traumatized by what he had been forced to do, in fact his mind could not handle what had happened and was starting to spiral into insanity. He was never trained to be a midwife, let alone perform emergency surgery of this magnitude. He stood there just holding the new born(me), just stood there and stared at the blood drenched baby he had just delivered and the baby stared right back with its green eyes. Then something strange happened, the baby smiled at the intern and the insanity that was creeping into the intern's mind began to retreat, the poison of madness that was polluting and clouding his reason vanished. The intern never noticed what happened , he thought that the whole episode was a hallucination brought on by his stress. He dismissed the whole thing and just started to clean up the baby with a towel. With all the nurses busy with other cases he personally took the baby(me) to the pediatric ward.

He put me down in one of the many cribs in the pediatric ward and made sure I was tucked in and comfortable . Afterwards he shakily sat down to fill some forms about my basic information since I was now an orphan and a ward of the state. While he was filling the forms I was sleeping peacefully in my crib, blissfully unaware that the frazzled intern had not even noticed that I was a girl and that he had named me a perfectly normal name for a boy.

He had named me Peter.