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In Vienna the little cakes looked like the big buildings, or else the big buildings looked like the little cakes. She ate both, layer upon layer. Then, as she swung in the highest car of the Ferris wheel in the Prater, coffee sloshing in her stomach above the linden leaves, her phone buzzed and there were the words, from her far mother, Something has gone wrong, and How soon can you get here?
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fast fast fast fast fast
if the world is still there when she gets here haha
* * *
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Gap.
Gap.
Gap.
Gap.
Great gap in the thrumming of the knowing of the news.
* * *
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The question that was the pure liquid element of the portal—who am I failing to protect?—had found its stopped-clock answer. She fell heavily out of the broad warm us, out of the story that had seemed, up till the very last minute, to require her perpetual co-writing. Oh, she thought hazily, falling rainwise like Alice, finding tucked under her arm the bag of peas she once photoshopped into pictures of historical atrocities, oh, have I been wasting my time?
* * *
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“Women don’t look like that anymore!” the man next to her on the flight home barked, staring at Marilyn Monroe’s hips as they fishtailed their way in sequins across her iPad. She nodded with unexpected sympathy. It was one thing they could agree on: that women, whatever progress they might have made, did not look like that anymore. Women, she thought, rubbing hopelessly at the ruined wing of her eyeliner, would never look that way again.
* * *
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“Tell me,” she said to her mother in the car. The last maternal text had just been a row of blue hearts and the spurting three droplets, which she no longer had the heart to explain were jizz. Her mother laid her head against the steering wheel and began to weep.
* * *
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The strange and sideways uses to which art were put! She stood in the hospital dark with her sister, holding her slender hand and smoothing a wave of bleached hair back from her forehead. Her sister’s husband rocked back and forth on his heels, boyish in basketball shorts and flip-flops, unable to stand still. The tech moved the ultrasound wand over the curve of stomach until a huge womph of heart filled the room, red-black and fuzzed at the edges, somehow functioning. They were waiting for the baby to move her diaphragm, the tech explained, in and out, in and out. This would show that her body was learning how to breathe. The tech watched and watched, pressing the wand so hard that her sister cried. On the ultrasound monitor a small everything swam and bulged; it was impossible to look at the gray and black wash of it and not be reminded of both the History Channel and outer space. Still, the baby would not practice her breathing, would not practice it in preparation for being born. The baby would not practice being in the world—why should she?—until she said to her sister, “I have an idea,” and took out her phone to blare the up-tempo songs of the Andrews Sisters, sturdy mules and wide lapels and high brass shining in the hospital dark, music for the boys to listen to overseas, far from home and frightened, bright lungfuls for them to gulp before they headed over. It had been useful. It was useful again. The baby, where she did not need to, breathed.
* * *
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The tech could see everything—the head that was measuring ten weeks ahead of the rest of the body, the asymmetry in arms and legs, the eyes that would not close—but she wasn’t allowed to say anything about it. She marked down measurements, her mouth like a single stitch. At the end she smiled shyly. “I like your music,” she said.
* * *
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For a while all anyone could talk about was what the baby might be missing, in tones of portent and doom. “Forgive me for thinking,” she argued in the shower, “that every baby should get to have an ass. Call me old-fashioned, but I happen to believe that a BABY! should get to have an ASS! no matter WHAT!”
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Saw my daughter’s on the ultrasound
I’ve been this way so long, I don’t know how to be anymore
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None of the doctors, nurses, or specialists ever breathed a word about abortion. Because twenty-six weeks was already too late? Because it was Ohio, and the governor’s pen was constantly hovering over terrible new legislation? Because the hospital was Catholic, and there was a statue of Jesus holding a farm animal in the lobby? They never exactly knew. “Did you read that article . . .” her sister asked one morning, and immediately she knew which one: a woman who had to fly hundreds of miles to Las Vegas, fight head-down through a churn of protesters, and finally lie down on the table in a paper gown behind six inches of bulletproof glass. “I keep thinking of the protesters,” her sister said. “Spit flying from their mouths. How none of them knew.”