The Wreck by Cassandra Jackson

Author:Cassandra Jackson [Jackson, Cassandra]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2023-05-16T00:00:00+00:00

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With the embryo inside me, I walk through my house, sure that this two-story home with spare modern furniture has turned itself into an abortion factory. I am carrying an embryo in my body, but that embryo has not implanted in my womb and could pass from my body at any moment. Each stairstep makes me into an old woman, clinging to the rail for fear of falling. When I lean forward to get on my low platform bed, I feel my abdominal muscles squeezing the embryo out of my body like toothpaste from a tube. The shower threatens to spray water so hot that it will boil my offspring before breakfast. The bathroom whispers all the tales I have heard of young mothers whose babies surprised them by slipping from their wombs into toilets. If a whole baby could be accidently pushed out of a womb, how could a tiny embryo stay put? Every time I shit, I wonder if my embryo has been baptized in bacteria and flushed away.

None of this makes sense. If new life required all this caution, there would be no babies. When I am out in the world, I return to reason, my mind on ideas, work, and the mundane. But when I come back to my house and I am myself without witnesses, the house’s walls saturated with rich, dark paint that I chose because it was comforting now seem to envelop and suffocate me, and I creep through the rooms as if I am trying to hide from a god.

On the ninth day after the embryo was transferred to my body, I go to the IVF clinic for a pregnancy blood test. When I arrive at the fertility clinic, I sign in with the same slips of paper I have used for all the previous blood tests. But this time, instead of checking a box next to “monitoring,” I check “pregnancy test” and hand the paper to the receptionist. I sit down wanting something else to be different, to match the excitement and fear that sits at the base of my throat. But when the nurse calls my name, she leads me to the same chairs I’ve been sitting in for weeks. Today my dark blood races out of my body at the first chance, zipping through a thin tube and into a vial. As she drops the vial in a pile of others, the nurse says in a soft voice without looking at me, “Good luck.”

Eight hours later, I am walking on my toes between the bathroom and my bed when my phone rings. I answer and a voice says, “I’m sorry. Your pregnancy test was negative.”

I thank her, in that way one thanks a funeral director for making arrangements—polite but absent. Grief slices through me, intense and unexpected, and my body freezes against a wall.

When I can breathe again, I call Reginald to tell him that I am not pregnant. He tells me how sorry he is.

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