Page 19 - WTP Vol. IX #10

picture she looked wild and sad, like she’d been split open and was experiencing unspeakable loss. She didn’t look at all relieved, like she’d wanted to do the thing she did. And on some level, this made more sense than the alternative, didn’t it? A child has no chance of surviving without its mother. The woman also looked, she noticed, like a new mother, bored and exhausted and scared to death.
“Hey, you okay?” Her husband was standing in the doorframe, looking down at her. He squinted in the bright light. “Are you doom googling?”
was too gentle to ask it differently, to ask if she’d
done anything at all today, if she’d opened a single book or brochure he’d brought home. If she’d moved from the couch that was starting to retain her imprint even when she wasn’t there.
The night before, she’d read about the chemical tricks babies can play. How no one truly ever remembers the pain they were in, because the moment they put the screaming wrinkled thing on your chest, you for- get it all, just like that.
Her friend confirmed that this part was true, too. “Kind of fucked up, isn’t it?”
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She read that when it was actually time, you’d know it. She hadn’t understood this because that time in the hallway, and all the other times after it, she’d sworn it was time, and it had turned out not to be.
But now that it was time, she understood perfectly. Of all the things she’d read she was supposed to feel or might possibly feel, this was the first one she could say felt absolutely and undeniably true. This time, it was most definitely time.
The first thing that happened after the initial excite- ment of calling her husband, and him crossing town, and the two of them driving fast but not too fast back across town again, was that she went invisible.
There she was, about to burst in the beeping room, the bulge inside her preparing for one last explosion, a grand finale of cartilage and hair and bone, and everyone was going about their business like this was some regular Friday and the world wasn’t ending.
Later on she’d learn that she’d got it wrong. She hadn’t actually gone invisible, they told her. It only
“Maybe.”
“I love you. Now let me pee, please.”
He stooped down to kiss her on the head.
“Come to bed soon, okay? And google something nicer in the meantime. Like kittens. A parade of kit- tens, frolicking in a field of wildflowers. Google that.”
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“Yeah, no one tells you about the poop.” “So it happened to you?”
“Yep, all three times. By the third time I was like, I’m a pro, I’ve got it this time, but then, nope, pooped right into some nurse’s hand.”
“Oh my god.”
“They tell you it’s no big deal, it happens all the time, and you won’t give a damn about it once you’re hold- ing your baby.”
“Is that true?”
“I mean, kind of. But it also kind of pisses me off. Like, I just shat in your hand. Maybe this happens to you all the time, but it sure as hell doesn’t to me. It just so happens to be a big fucking deal to me.”
That night in the cocoon, she repeated this to her husband while he looked up at her from his nest
of empty boxes and bubble wrap, peeled tape and bits of plastic all around him. She emphasized the coarsest words, words like “shat” and “fucking,” just like her friend would do, and she added in
the last part, about it being a big fucking deal, for embellishment, until she had him in stitches on the living room floor.
It had started with him asking, as he did every eve- ning, if she’d gotten out today, talked to anyone. He
felt that way.
(continued on next page)
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