Your older sister, Bess, cracked a joke about the sorry state of your lawn, which is why a few months later you decided to grow something. You had no interest in a garden, but you were very interested in proving Bess wrong, so on the first warm Saturday of the year, you found yourself wandering down the aisles of Target wrestling flaccid bags of soil, fetid-looking bulbs. It made you wonder if they trained people who worked there to say things like that, to make such bald observations.
You watched her come across the little pregnancy test that you had snuck snugly between gardening supplies. You waited for her to say, “Looks like someone’s been ovulating!” But she didn’t say that. She didn’t say anything at all.
She just picked up the box, swiped it under the scanner’s light, and dropped it into the darkness of your sack. The word “sack” had been popping into your head a lot lately. Ever since November, when the doctor used it to describe the functions of the human uterus.
Tracing your belly in the appropriate places, he called it “sack-like.” You had made the mistake of expressing out loud your anxiety that even if you did get pregnant again, at your age your body wouldn’t know how to hang on to it, to keep it from slipping right out once more. You kept surreptitiously raising your hips off the mattress, thinking you could feel it working. Biology, gravity, whatever.
When Mick asked why you were so fidgety, you said your lower back was bothering you. Mick kept one hand on your belly, told you in a sleepy voice that you just needed to be kinder to yourself, more accepting of the way your body was maturing. Maturing?” You inched your pelvis even higher under the sheets.
You contemplated for a long time that night and in the end decided to forgo one more pill, maybe two. No more than three, tops. Next to you, Mick snored away, blissfully untroubled.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
