This Is Not Your City by Caitlin Horrocks

Author:Caitlin Horrocks [Horrocks, Caitlin]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: Fiction, Short Stories (Single Author)
ISBN: 9781932511918
Publisher: Sarabande Books
Published: 2011-01-01T05:00:00+00:00

Embodied

In this, my 127th life, I am employed as an internal auditor with Wells Fargo. I live in Des Moines, Iowa, in a white, threebedroom house. I have a husband named Murray, and six months ago I had a baby son named Jacob. I don’t have him anymore.

Murray’s good with kids. He teaches the fourth grade. He’s the only man on staff at Haisley Elementary apart from the gym teacher and the janitor, so he gets fussed over. I can’t tell if he likes it or if he’s lonely. I went to the Haisley Curriculum Night with Murray this past spring, just to be supportive, look at the projects his students had been working on. They were the same ones he does every year, the self-portraits in pastels, the informational posters on native bird species, the puppets of Harriet Tubman, Matthew Henson, Martin Luther King, Jr. for Black History Month. I sat up front at Murray’s desk while he talked to the parents, telling them about the curricular goals for the fourth-grade year and the upcoming Iowa Standardized Educational Assessment Tests. I’d started showing and it made people tender with me. They offered me seats, brought me fruit punch in paper cups.

“Mr. Rankin’s so good with the children,” they said. “He must be so excited.”

The parents were polite to me, but distant, too, like I was breeding something on Murray’s behalf. Still, it’s always nice to see someone you care for be complimented, recognized, given plates of cookies and African violets in orange plastic pots. At home our windowsills are filled with African violets, tiny purple flowers and thick fuzzy green leaves. I kill them deliberately. If I didn’t, the whole house would fill up with them.

“Is it your first?” the parents asked, and I nodded.

In fact, over 127 lives I’ve been pregnant something like 200, maybe 220 times. The numbers get a little hazy. But I figured I knew what to expect. We’d decided to try for a baby, and I’d gotten pregnant quickly. The first few weeks, we were both excited. But when I was sick in the mornings, when my belly seized around itself, I could feel that something was wrong.

There were a few kids at Curriculum Night, even though they weren’t supposed to be there. Their parents said they couldn’t find babysitters. The kids were bouncing off the walls, full of fruit punch and sugar cookies, and Murray finally made them go stand out in the hall. He didn’t let them back in until their parents were ready to leave. When he opened the door the kids shot back in, unrepentant, and knocked over three of the child-sized blue plastic chairs and a desk. “You’re sure you want one?” I asked, hand on my belly. It was early enough that I was still hoping that one of those days he might just say “no,” and we could call the whole thing off.

“Ours will be different,” he said, locking his classroom door behind us. We headed out to the parking lot.

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