On Gestation

They’re carrying a man’s cart away. It was his livelihood. He dragged it behind his bicycle, through the markets, selling ol’fashin’d (and lukewarm) tacos de lengua with spicy tomatillo sauce. They’re good enough, his customers said, and they’re only a dollar. But a tithe of all the dollars he collected couldn’t satisfy the ministry, and they came for his cart with batons.

It’s because times are hard. All kinds of people know that. People buy less cheese; more flour. Fewer beds; more blankets. Less meat; more liquor. In the spring, the young women are pregnant and they walk around woozy, afflicted, charmed.

Hours go by. Their breasts swell. They talk to their mothers in a birdlike tongue: they twitter and ululate. Their mothers puff out their own breasts, they pluck at the straps on their jackets. Young men are in the dark streets between shops, standing next to stacks of empty packaging and washtubs. The mothers call, the young women practice careful breathing, and the young men step out, satisfied, shamed, and lithe as opiated cats.

Inside an exhilarated young woman, the temperature rises. The blastocyst struggles to right itself. It finally finds purchase on a ledge or crease or tiny fold, and there it snuggles in. Long before limbs or eyes or lungs form, tiny sweat glands begin the work of generating the amniotic fluid. In the coming days, the fluid will fill the woman’s abdomen and dilute her blood to consistency of tart red wine.

All too soon, the baby grows. Now, the baby swims among the mother’s organs like a pearl diver among anemones. Now the baby is like a tradesman trudging through a crowd. Now, like an olive in a jar. Now the woman’s abdomen stretches like a baking loaf. She leans back, eyes tight, and laughs like a prevailing general.

The young man comes to put an ear to her browning belly skin. He thumps her belly with his middle finger twice, looks at his mother-in-law, and nods. The mother-in-law clucks, smiles, and goes away to find her husband. When she brings him back, Grandpa-to-be, she’s also brought along a salami and a bottle of wine. They eat, and drink, and watch the barges on the river.

A stranger approaches, cries out, squats, and touches the young woman on the belly. The baby inside sees the impressions of two turkeys, two tarantulas, two bursts of tentacles, a headdress and a rising sun. The baby reaches out to touch them, but they’re gone too soon.

There is no more air in the abdomen, and the baby is exhausted from holding its breath. Because of this it sleeps a lot–sometimes 27, 29 hours a day. When not asleep, it plays with the kidneys, becomes tangled in intestines, and consoles the tiny, terrified ovaries. Aside from this there is nothing to do inside the abdomen; no daily paper, no gossip, no work, no vice; so the baby focuses on growing and eats half of what the mother swallows before it hits her stomach.

This, in every porch, at every sitting room, in the evening of the pregnancy: Mothers and fathers gather a pot, stack of blankets, a forceps and a set of candles. Mothers and fathers count up to 42, then down to 37. Mothers and fathers wait as their baby grows; watch their daughter’s stomachs swell; think selfish thoughts; break the glasses; call to birds; eat and drink and listen to a sound like stretching leather.