Sparticle Lights from the 11th Dimension OR The Bang of a Door, Open and Shut OR Paper People Chains Elbowing Cupcakes

A red arrow blazes in the center of the sky. It points right, toward the future. Fragments of metal and points of glass clutter the pavement, the asphalt melting at 92 degrees. Keys are dangle from the ignition in a sing-song dance. May is not sure if he’s been kicked out of her body. She listens for his tiny cry but only hears the jingle of the disconnected seatbelt or the humming alarm of the open door, she’s not sure which. She can’t feel her toes. She thinks she sees a green oval of light circle around her head but thinks again. He can’t be gone. He just got here.

May presses her palm against her round belly, a stethoscope listening for a heartbeat. Her surroundings are at once familiar and strange. She can’t quite make out the shapes around her. She smells gasoline and orange peel and something else, perhaps cheese. Vehicles pass back and forth and sound like water.

It’s all water under the bridge, Seymour said the second time. It’s done now. We never have to speak of it again.

You shouldn’t speak of the dead, she thought.

But was it dead, or not living? Where was the line drawn? A vacuum sucking out the cells was forgettable. Erased. And what of the others? Was a dumpster baby ever alive?

The first time, they both agreed that termination was the only way. They were young and poor, children themselves. They could not be responsible. He thought they agreed the second time, now years later. But when she arrived at the clinic, she failed to go in.

Meant to be!

May is crooked on the ground, partly in, partly out of the car. She’s afraid to move. There is a telephone wire in the distance, if she could only call to it. Get connected. The wire looks like a flat line drawn on the sky but she knows it is solid and cylindrical. If she were an ant, she could walk on it and curl around to the other side, unseen from this part of the world.

Perhaps he is in one of the eleven curled up dimensions. He may be invisible now, to the untrained eye.

Will he have blue eyes?

Will he have dark hair?

Will he be tall?

Will he be a she?

People make mistakes. Doctors make mistakes.

You were a mistake! We never meant to have you!

(Meanwhile.)

What passes when there is no time?

May and Seymour sit in the dim café. They are discussing the possibility of time travel.

“How can you travel to different times if the notion of time itself is an illusion? If there is no time outside of our perception on this planet, then the idea of traveling through time is absurd.” He taps his spoon on the edge of his coffee cup.

Ordinarily, May enjoys these discussions. But today she is preoccupied. She just found out that she is not pregnant and wonders if this means something in the greater scheme of things.

“Do you think it will ever be possible to go back and change things?” she asks, partly to Seymour, partly to the cosmos. “We can record sound and play it back and it sounds the same as the original.”

“With good equipment,” he says.

“We can take photographs and videos of ourselves. But it’s not the real thing. We can’t make a copy of ourselves living and breathing.”

“You want your own clone?”

“It’s not about cloning or copying. It’s about alternate realities. A fork in the road. The same person goes both ways simultaneously. Split in two, but remaining as one.” This opens up another world of travel, she thinks. “Or maybe you wouldn’t have to go back in time to change because there is some alternate dimension that is already living the life you want.”

“Or the life you fear,” he interjects, pointing his spoon at her. “If there’s a place where all your dreams come true, then it stands to reason that there’s a place that houses all your nightmares.”

She nods, takes a sip of black coffee, and stares out the dark window into space. So where is she now? Are all her wishes about to come true or slowly dying? She scans the café and wonders how she ever got there—in this time, in this space, with this man. “Do you ever see someone from behind and think they look one way, only to have them turn around and their face does not match their body in the way you thought it would?”

Seymour shifts his weight in his chair and tries to find her eyes, but they are drops of stars and space. “Some days are better than others.”

“But aren’t they really all the same? Filled with the same potential?” She looks at him and feels the hollow in her belly. “Isn’t it up to us to make them ordinary or strange?”

(Meanwhile.)

There is a yellow and black sign by the fire department building that shows an icon of a baby. It is a signal that unwanted infants may be dropped off with no questions asked. The authorities would rather have girls leave a child at a station than in a dumpster. This way, it would give the child a chance to live.

Live how? Live in a foster home? Live in a trailer? Live in a shelter? Bea doesn’t want it to be found. She doesn’t want its cry to signal anyone to search for it.

It’s not that Bea can’t smother it, she is waiting for the right time. The baby grows before her eyes. Soon it won’t be a baby. It’ll start talking an become a kid, a person.

Babies die all the time of natural causes—why can’t hers? Sudden Infant Death Syndrome: SIDS. She calls the baby Sid in hope that this will inspire his death. Each morning that she finds him alive and breathing, she throws a stuffed elephant at his face. Damn you! Let some other kid live. You’re sucking the air out of the planet. You’ll kill us all. She is convinced that he is taking the life of another child. She scans the newspapers for reports of baby deaths. Is this the one you took? Look at this sad couple. They wanted their baby. Look at all the toys in its room. Look what you took from them! I won’t let you take anymore baby lives. You’re not meant to be here. You are a mistake.

(Meanwhile.)

“We made a mistake,” Seymour says to Will. The café is warm and throbbing with activity. Steam shoots from a metal piston.

Will sits in a wooden chair and shrugs. “I can’t wait to have one. It’s Bea that’s not ready.” A glowing green oval of light settles around his heart. He wants to invite it into his world but he can do nothing until it is time.

Seymour takes a long swallow of his foamy drink. The sound of shooting steam pours through his ears. “Timing, timing,” he shakes his head. “It’s never time.”

“It’s always time for something, even if it’s not what you expect.”

“I expect nothing. And I get this.” Bodies crowd together and stand in line, shaking fists. “I think she wants to keep it.”

Will feels the familiar stirring in his heart and moves forward, spilling his coffee.

“People make mistakes.”

(Meanwhile.)

A man falling off his barstool asks her, “Are you pregnant?” and May blushes with her friends surrounding her. If you have to ask, don’t. She is slim, but it is the way the coat hangs on her, an empress waistline which poofs out around the middle. When she sits, it is hard to tell where her belly ends. Her friend, Bea, slaps the man. May wonders if pregnant women are even aloud inside bars these days.

“I didn’t mean any offense,” the man says. “I wish I could have a baby.” He rubs his swelling stomach.

“Looks like you only have about another two months,” Bea says and points to his beer belly and the girls all giggle except May. She’d known for three years that she could never bear children. She’d gotten into a car accident and had her insides ripped out. She was twenty-two and it was alarming, but not devastating. Now she doesn’t have to worry about birth control. She stares at the drunken man’s belly until her friends pull her away.

(Meanwhile.)

“Sure, anything can happen, but it won’t,” the Dr. M tells Bea on the phone.

“Can I schedule one in two months? Maybe after lunchtime?”

Bea imagines diapers piling high to the sky, tall as buildings, all from one little baby. What about the rest of them? Millions of piles of diapers denser than black holes clogging the fabric of space and time.

“It’s better to have a natural birth than a cesarean.”

“I want this thing out of me.” His fingernails are growing. He’s clawing at her insides.

You will mess him up. He’s meant to be born at a particular time. The planets must be aligned a certain way at a certain hour. You shouldn’t meddle with destiny.

Get the cesarean. You don’t want your junk getting stretched out and distorted. It doesn’t bounce right back, you know.

Put the needle in, in the spine, the needle, the needle, the needle.

Are you going to get the epidural?

Get the epidural.

You’re not getting the epidural?

Get the drugs!

Just say no.

It’s safe.

It’s not safe.

It’s safe.

It’s not safe.

It’s safe.

It’s not safe.

Eenie meenie miney moe. Catch a baby by its toe.

He’s facing the wrong direction, sitting on his butt, not upside down, head first. If he doesn’t move, the choice will be made. Prepare for surgery.

Will hollers down the stairs to her. “Honey Bea! Where’s your bag?”

He is calmer than she thought he’d be.

The incision is small and low. They call it a bikini cut. You can wear a bikini and the scar will be covered. As if she ever owned a bikini.

(Meanwhile.)

The doctor shakes his head. Barren like the tundra. A tumbleweed ghost town. Maybe it’s him. Maybe it’s his little fish bait that aren’t alive. Maybe they have no power to swim upstream. They are weak and have no tails.

But no. It’s May’s eggs that are stale and rotten. Cracked, the yoke spilled and crusted long ago. If it were him, there would still be hope. But her.

She leaves in a panic. She doesn’t want to go home and break the news. She takes a detour. She drives into a grocery store parking lot and sits for 17 minutes before exiting the car.

In the store, the perfectly lined-up egg cartons cover their mouths and laugh at her. There are no green lights around her head or heart.

It wasn’t meant to be.

It was meant to be!

It wasn’t meant to be.

Congratulations!

Every child that passes by seems to know. They look at her intensely and she wants to smack them. She wants to smear their faces with frosted cupcakes and make them scream.

Damn you!

At the café, a three-year-old boy finds her and sits beside her. He is working on some kind of snowflake or paper doll. She decides that a three-year-old’s body might be the ideal state of being: compact and perfectly proportioned. Not too tall, not too short, and with minds full of wonder, but not too smart for their own good. If only we could all stay in three-year-old bodies. But we have to grow and hunch and worry and have our insides ripped open.

The boy presses his fingers to his nose and points at her head. Does he see something that she can’t? Children are more psychic. They haven’t been conditioned to be blind. Does he see any green lights? Perhaps the doctor was wrong. Even doctors make mistakes.

The boy shakes his fists at her and takes a bite of cupcake. His mother scoops him up and takes him away. He leaves behind his paper project. May unfolds it and reveals a chain of people holding hands.

Where to put her burning love? How can anyone feel love for something that they cannot see?

(Meanwhile.)

Through the wormhole, it is created. Stretching the fabric of time and space, it bends and transforms into a single point of origin and opens its unformed eyes inside her womb. It’s not unlike the world he came from, dark and pulsing.

Inside, it grows and swells, the universe of her belly, expanding. For now, this is all the unborn child knows. The world from which it came is already fading, its green-lighted brothers and sisters another lifetime away. It focuses on the moment. On pumping blood. On beating hearts, two of them, and the cord that binds them.

May sits in a café with families surrounding her. A baby in a stroller looks in May’s eyes and she feels like he has a message for her. He just came from the other side. He’d recently been with them, the other spirit babies. He’d just been one of them, a green oval of light hovering around his mother’s heart, waiting for the two to get together, for the cells to form. Finally he is here and it is as if no time has passed. But for an instant, the other place comes into mind, the middle of his forehead, just under his soft spot, and when he looks at her, he is reminded. He sees two lights around her, glowing, waiting for the transformation. He knows they will be coming soon, emerging, just like him. And then he looks away and goes on with his dribbling and flaps his arms up and down and squeezes his little fingers because they feel so good. He has a body now and he is going to use it.

(Meanwhile.)

The day is hot and dripping. The face of Bea’s wristwatch seems to melt in the sun at 89 degrees. She sits on her balcony wondering why her son’s nubby fingers don’t clutch to the edge. They always grip her thumb so tight. But when she drops him over the railing and he doesn’t grab hold of the sanded wood, she takes this as a sign of weakness. “He never wanted to be here anyway.” He wants to go back to where he came from. Sometimes we have to take matters into our own hands.

She wipes her sweaty hands on her pants and brushes them off against each other. If her palms were neighboring planes of existence, she would be creating Big Bangs at 1.7 times per second. She turns back toward the house.

Jump from one world to the next. It’s easy as one—

“The baby fell,” she says to Will in the living room.

He is used to these remarks. “So pick him up,” he says.

“He’s dead.”

He sighs and gets up from the couch. He goes into the nursery and finds the baby lying on the floor beside his crib. He doesn’t cry, but looks at his father with watery eyes. Will picks him up and pats him on the back.

One, two, three! Wee! Fly away and oops! He fell! I wasn’t holding on tight enough! Come back to me!

He’s gone, he’s gone!

(Meanwhile.)

May is driving in heavy traffic going home after work. She’d been famished when she left the office, and in the car, balancing the steering wheel between her forearms and belly, she opens a cellophane packet of crackers and crumbles them into her mouth. She gnaws on a stick of string cheese, not bothering with peeling the strings off in thin strips like she used to do as a child, but rather, bites off the tip and keeps whittling down until the whole stick has been consumed in a few meager bites.

The car in front of her comes to a dead stop at the bend in the freeway, the part where the sun is in everyone’s eyes. May slows and feels nauseous, the cheese not sitting well, why had she gulped it down? Dinner is not so far away, she could have waited. But Sidney had called to her, feed me, feed me! She feels his preformed mouth snapping up and down, all gums and sticky saliva, feed me! The cheese is gone but not digested. He didn’t want cheese. He is already finicky in the womb. Beggars can’t be choosers, she says to him. But his little bird mouth stretched open and took what she gave him and opened again, always wanting more, more. And if it wasn’t what he wanted, he wasn’t afraid to tell her. Like now, in the car, bumper-to-bumper, he tosses the cheese up, and she looks around the car, frantic, no napkins, no towels, not even an old chip bag or soda bottle.

May cups her hands in front of her and pukes the white slush into them. She nudges the automatic window button down and throws the puke out. The driver next to her looks at her in horror. She shrugs and wipes her hands on her shirt. She will have to remember to carry napkins, plastic bags, pre-moistened wipes. But for now, she is still stuck in traffic, the sun in her eyes, trying to get home to wash the stink off.

So he’s that kind of baby. The kind that throws-up in inappropriate places.

(Meanwhile.)

The baby comes out quickly. The car is so hot and the road, bumpy. Bea imagines marshmallows and chocolate and nuts rolled together. She can’t wait for her first drink in nine months. Champagne and strawberries all around! It isn’t so much to ask. She’s gone for so long. The little thing has been eating her alive.

“Would you like to hold your baby?”

No thanks.

“Would you like to feed him?”

No, you do it. I’m resting. Bring me some food. And a drink, while you’re at it. Steak and scotch. First drink in nine months? Yeah, right. It’s a miracle that baby came out right at all. A glass of wine every night. It helped calm my nerves and put me to sleep. He liked to wake me up at three in the morning and swim around, then try to suffocate me. I couldn’t breathe. He was pressing on my lungs. I drank chamomile and mint tea. But wine was the only thing that worked. The little drunk. Taking after Mommy.

(Meanwhile.)

May feels sharp pangs in her belly. There’s not enough room for it anymore. It’s been kicking a lot, wanting to come out, but it’s a month early. It’s been telling her things. It wants some fresh air. It’s suffocating.

“Oh, we’re so careful,” Seymour says at the café. May is sitting across from him staring into a black square of space. He appears to be talking to himself. “We waited the proper amount of time, researched until our faces turned blue.”

The cord wraps around, turning it blue. So easy to slip from one world into the next.

The night sky only shines black. Actually, it is indigo, the darkest of inky blues. She tries to find an exploding star, a falling asteroid, a planet rotation, something to contrast against the darkness. “I want to see more,” she says to him or no one. “There must be more.”

She read that you are supposed to bundle babies tight. Infants like to be restrained. It gives them a sense of security. They are used to being in a cramped space. Squeeze it tight so its eyes bulge, so its fat neck bunches around his throat.

The umbilical cord wraps around its neck, strangled by its own life source.

Birds flap and make their own wind and blow the candles out. There will be no birthday today as planned. When they open her, it is dead.

(Meanwhile.)

Will and Bea sit in an empty bar waiting for an answer. They are expecting a call from a friend or a doctor or the police. Bea rocks back and forth on her bar stool and Will tells her to stop, she might fall. Bea secretly wants to fall.

“Sick,” Will says, glancing at the television overhead. A woman reports on a newborn found dead inside a local dumpster.

Bea looks at the shriveled lump they are calling Johnny. “It probably was a meth-baby.”

Will gives her a sharp look. “So it deserves to die?”

She shrugs. “It was going to die anyway. Why not put it out of its misery?”

“Everyone deserves a chance.”

Bea slouches and picks at the lemon wedge hanging from her glass of iced tea. She doesn’t feel like talking. She wants a drink but he won’t let her, just in case something is growing inside her, sucking at her life juices. He sips his beer and carefully wipes the froth away. His precise mannerisms make her itch and she rocks harder on the bar stool. She wonders if anyone would ever consider that it’s the baby’s own damn fault that it rushed into the world too soon, without an invitation. It was the baby that was greedy for life and now has to pay. The mother was just fulfilling her karmic roll. But Bea knows that the spirit inside that dumpster baby will find its way back, back into their familiar dimension. If there is one thing she’s learned it’s that life is full of chances.

(Meanwhile.)

There is no time between worlds. No space between movements. From one mouth of the wormhole to the next in no time flat.

Sitting at a round café table, Bea puts her hand to her cheek, to her mouth, and stirs her latte. May slouches forward and stares deep into her black coffee. If Bea wasn’t there, she would let herself slip, fall into the black tar of space, sticky with possibility. She can’t see the bottom of the cup through the dark liquid and wonders what it would take to get there. She could travel by spoon or wooden stick or red plastic straw in hope to find some answers, some proof of the other side. But she doesn’t have anything to prove. She knows.

“I’m pregnant,” Bea says, and tries to blush, but can’t. She’s not the type.

May stiffens and gulps her coffee. She wants to stop time, pause so she can let it soak in before reacting. She would open her eyes wide and let out a happy little scream and embrace her with loving arms. She would say “oh my gosh!” and “wow!” They would talk about names and maternity leave and hip baby outfits.

She would not freeze and say nothing. She would not let her eyes well up with tears and have to excuse herself for the bathroom and not come out for 13 minutes. She would not forget to hug her. She would not forget to say congratulations. She would not want to slap her. She would not want to wring her thin, smooth neck.

All the kids in the café scream and laugh at her in unison. They form a circle around her and do a dance, thumbing their sticky noses. Bea leads them into song.

Some things are meant to happen, they sing. All things happen for a reason. It’s destiny. It’s karma. It’s a spiritual law.

Shut up.

(Meanwhile.)

May can’t go to the clinic. It isn’t about morals or protesters. It is his voice, growing inside of her. He tells her of the dimension he’s come from:

There is no time, no space. We are only little green lights, floating around your auras, waiting to get in. We play with each other, skitter around, dodge and loop-dee-loop. We tease and nudge and bicker about who will get to go first. But we are not angry. Just excited and anxious to get in. We have been here before in different lifetimes with different names and roles. You were my son and now I will be your son. Your world is filled with so much, so many things to touch. Your world will become our world. As soon as I was given the chance, I rushed right in! And now I can’t wait to come out.

Come and celebrate Sidney’s Coming Out party!

Breast or bottle?

It’s healthier.

They leak.

It forms a bond.

It’s socially awkward.

It’s more natural.

It’s more convenient.

It’s cheaper.

It hurts.

Don’t forget.

Don’t let him sleep too long.

Don’t let him eat too much.

Don’t give him too much attention.

Don’t ignore him.

The tunnel looks like a vortex, a wormhole, but it is only natural. It’s warm and dark and wet in there. But there is light at the end. The green lights will form and grow and come out the hole into the world. Come out the way it came in.

A wormhole will transport them to the other side of the planet.

(Meanwhile.)

Bea winces when Will hits the door against the wall. The doorknob pounds and chips off another chunk of plaster. With great force he flings the heavy wooden door, steps in, newspaper in hand, and begins to shout out, “How’s my honey-Bea?” then stops and changes his mantra to incorporate her swelling uterus: “How’s my honey-bun-in-the-oven?” Bea responds the same as she does everyday, hoisting herself from the couch, rubbing her belly, and kissing Will on the forehead. “We’re doing just fine.”

Bea is convinced that Dr. M is hiding something from her. She can smell a tinge of pro-life emanating from him. If there is a problem, he wouldn’t tell her for fear she would do something about it. But she has a right to know. She knows it already. At thirty-seven, Bea is taking a risk. She knows the kinds of complications she can have. She can feel it growing and taking her over. It is taking her breath.

Will says, “I thought women were supposed to have a glow.” Bea looks muted. Her hair is dull, her eyes flat. “You should call May. Maybe she could help spark some life into you.”

But Bea already has one life too many. She wants to fall. Wants to make herself fall. It will only hurt for a little bit. He will come in and find her on the floor, smashed. It smashed. Then it will be over. It will be dead. She thinks about taking something. But how can she focus it, make it go down right to kill it, not her. She wants it to end.

(Meanwhile.)

It hurts to walk. May feels like he is still in there. She doesn’t feel quite like the same person. She cannot go back and change or erase.

People make mistakes. Men make mistakes.

The thing is ripped from her and she doesn’t know if it’s her blood or his. She wonders if he hurts too. Does it hurt to move from one world to the next?

“Don’t be ridiculous,” Seymour says. “They cut you open. You’re not coming home for at least another day.”

They are in different rooms now, apart. But does this physical separation make them less connected? She can still feel him moving, breathing. There is a cord that binds them.

(Meanwhile.)

“Can someone please explain this to me?” The café is sweltering. A fly buzzes around their heads and iced coffees.

May straightens and fills her lungs with air, rubbing her round belly. “The shortest distance between two objects is a straight line, right?”

Bea nods.

“But say you have a cupcake in one hand and your arm is outstretched in front of you. There is a long distance between your hand holding the cupcake and your mouth. But if you simply bend your elbow, the cupcake reaches your mouth in no time. And the line is not straight. It’s bent. There are elbows all over the universe. And they make things happen faster. Only there is no ‘faster’ because there is no time.”

Bea stares out the window at the heat waves lifting off the asphalt. Something doesn’t feel right. “How can there be no time?”

“It’s an illusion that we have to accept to live here on Earth. But we’re just a little part of the whole.” May rubs her belly in soft circles and sucks black iced liquid from a straw.

The fly circles around Bea’s head and she swats at it, staring at May’s abdomen, eyes piercing through the layers of thin fabric and skin and beyond the walls of her uterus at the curled-up fetus sucking its thumb. “I’m glad I don’t want kids.”

May rubs herself. “You might change your mind.”

Bea shakes her head. The fly lands on their table and she takes a newspaper and rolls it up and aims.

May opens her eyes wide and braces herself. There are multiple dimensions around them too small to see, curled up in their laps. They are giants. They are ants. They are micro and macro and somewhere in between.

Bea hits the fly and flicks it off the table, satisfied.

(Meanwhile.)

Bea looks around their small home and walks to the room prepared, waiting. The walls are painted in eggy yellow and white. There are stacks of cards decorated with birds: storks, ducks, doves. Little down-covered animals grin at her through pink and blue ribbons. She counts the weapons: a bottle, suffocating, a rattle, bludgeoning, a safety pin, stabbing.

Will and Bea had been trying to get pregnant for three years. Once the wand turned blue the mailbox flooded with congratulations. Will blabbed to everyone right away, without checking first. Without making sure it was going to be ok. But in the doctor’s office, Bea saw the nurse turn and shake her head to the other nurse. They knew something. It was going to be wrong.

(Meanwhile.)

The café is throbbing with human life forms on planet Earth. May points to the cookie in the shape of a little man. “I’ll take two,” she says. “One for me, one for him.” She points at her belly and the cashier and the people standing in line behind her all smile. The prospect of new life reminds them of the clean-slated potential they once had. May takes the little man cookie and nibbles at its brain.

Sidney says to her from inside, “You think time travel is so strange, but you do it everyday. You are constantly projecting into the past and the future. When was the last time you really lived in the present?”

“Why do you talk like an adult and not a child?”

“I’m not a child yet. I’ve done this before, remember? So have you. Thousands of lives.”

A toddler runs around the café with his arms sticking out. He waddles with an open sticky smiling mouth. He has no concept of time. No notion of cause and effect. He presses his face against the glass pastry case living without consequence.

Same place, same time.

Same place, different time.

Different time, same place.

Different place, different time.

Bend over and walk to the other side of the world.

Something else could be happening.

Something quite similar, but entirely different.

A different outcome.

Different result to the same action.

Rewind, backtrack, fast-forward, stay still.

Dance when there’s nothing left to do. Dance when it’s the only thing to stop you from bursting into cold flame.

A boy or a girl?

As long as it’s healthy.

I want to be able to dress her up.

I want to play catch.

It doesn’t matter.

As long as it’s alive.

The baby dies before it can be born.

Celebrate Sidney’s coming out party!

(Meanwhile.)

Bea sits and listens to it scream and wants to smother it. She comes this close. Blanket in hand, she approaches. She opens the window as if to throw it out. She tosses the blanket over its little body, its screaming soul. It writhes under the loose blanket, some kind of larva born from yellow fleece. She picks it up and plops it in the middle of the queen-size bed. It doesn’t know how to turn over yet, so it moves its chunky arms and legs and shrivels its face and screams and screams again. She rolls under the bed. Soon it will have to stop. It will get tired. It will go to sleep. And then she can go to sleep and dream this never happened.
It is too late for a dumpster.

(Meanwhile.)

Will and Seymour sit in a bright café. On the window sill, little baby mouths curl with scream. Karma karma karma karma karma karma!

“No,” Will says. “There is no afterlife. There is no before life. Just now. Here.”

“What about the cells? Isn’t pumping blood a sign of life?”

“No. When you are dead you are dead. When you are not born you are nothing.”

Seymour is worried about the formation of the fetus. When it kicked inside her, he felt it in his bones. Something was going to be wrong. “I could feel it,” he muttered. It hurt.

“It couldn’t be safer,” Will tells him. “These days, they go in, they go out. It’s over in a few minutes and you can go about your day. You can’t kill something that was never there.”

It wasn’t just a new life. It was an expression of love. He already felt connected to it. If it was happy, he could sleep. When it cried, he hurt. He never thought unborn children could cry. But then they weren’t really children, were they? Everyone is a spirit, waiting to form a body. If one body doesn’t work, the spirit moves to the next.

“It might be damaged.”

An expression of love? How can a wailing monster with half a brain be an expression of love?

“They can test for these things earlier and earlier, to see what your options are.”

(Meanwhile.)

Defective! Defective! I want an exchange! Send it back and get me one that’s not broken! I can’t fix this!

It’s Sidney talking, not her. He wants a new body. It’s not his time.

May doesn’t want any damaged goods. “It’s not like rescuing a dog from the pound,” she says to the bartender, to the floor, to the man slouching three stools away. “This kid has baggage.” On the TV, a woman reports about a dead baby. Not only did his mother abandon him, he was born with meth in his body. Or coke. He was never given a chance. He was a mistake.

A mistake.

He should never have come onto the planet. He was greedy to get here, to live a new life, he jumped in too soon and ended in a dumpster. The planet wasn’t ready for him. He squeezed in when there wasn’t enough room and now he has to pay with a life that’s not worth living.

May gulps down the last slosh of wine and asks for another glass. “It doesn’t matter. He’s asleep now. I can feel him sleeping.” He would be born asleep. The man three stools away rests his head on the bar. It is after six and dark out. “See how we are all part of the same?” She thinks, we are separate people but we are not separate from each other. When she feels a kick, so does her husband.

(Meanwhile.)

Her hand sweats on the rail by the stairs. What if it backfires? What if she really can’t get up? Bea thinks about that trick she learned as a child. Sticking a piece of clear tape over a balloon and fooling the audience by pricking the spot with a pin. Why, it didn’t pop, it’s magic! But the pin made a tiny hole, enough for the air to eventually escape. She can’t do this on her own.

Bea knows his routine. Always coming home on time, always exact. The door swings open on the oiled hinge. The door flings open. There is nothing to stop it. He flings it open and there is a crack of plaster cracking on the wall, falling to bits where the doorknob hits. She stands in front of the broken plaster wall, waiting. It’s right about belly height. If it doesn’t work the first time, she can always try again. She waits by the window, by the door. He will come any minute.

(Meanwhile.)

He will come any minute.

Pushing on top of him, pinning his arms on the over-stuffed pillows, whispering, “baby, baby,” and thinking, “baby, baby.” She could almost hear its infant cries forming. Baby, baby, make me a baby.

Bang. You’re dead.

Bang. You’re alive.

Bang: The point forms at the moment of conception, smaller than a particle, two worlds colliding. The (mem)branes hit with brief intensity and a light blinks and enters, filling the dark space, expanding.
Bang! The car hits her from behind and May skids forward, turning toward the curb. A green oval of light hovers around her body. It is the spirit of her unborn child waiting to enter the Earth’s dimension.

May lies on the ground, partly in, partly out of the car. A red arrow traffic light blazes in the center of the sky. Nearby, a telephone wire looks flat against a pale slice of sky. Fragments of metal and points of glass clutter the pavement, the asphalt melting at 92 degrees. May presses her palm against her belly. Her muscles are sore and unwilling to move, surrounded with the odor of gasoline and cheese. She tilts her head back and stares up at the sky. The red arrow turns green and points toward the future.