Monthly Theme

We had a plan: if it happened at home, ostensibly in our bathroom toilet, because we were optimists even in the midst of that personal tragedy, I would not try to retrieve the fetus. Our midwife had suggested that we could have a ceremony, but that didn’t feel right for us. We were sad, collectively, often in entirely different ways, but we didn’t feel
particularly in need of a ritual. Instead, I would just flush it, send it away, a subterranean passage between what we had imagined and what was actually happening, the unlikely closure we needed. I am a girl who knows how to stick to a plan. And so I did.

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Fear squeezes me into a sieve of silence. My ears defy the tv’s sounds and the Loud Mouth’s babble. The fluorescent lights are too bright. I can see every dirty scuff mark on the yellowing tile. How long do we sit here? My eyes have been on the floor but I glance up to see Loud Mouth’s face tilted in my direction, her tongue and lips flapping. She is talking to me. She is asking a question. Her words stretch like tendrils of flame across the room. They lick my ears, jolting my cochlea into submission.

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There’s a phrase I use to utter at parties in my 20s to make people laugh: Chuck Norris touched me inappropriately. Chuck Norris touched me inappropriately, I would say, with a twinkle in my eyes, a raise of my eyebrow, and a seductive grin, begging my friends to ask for more details.

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