That night, the headlights torched the cattails, waving goodbye
real slow. If this moment is going to matter, I’ll have to tell you
I was five months pregnant. I’ll tell you I was parked outside
 
her nursing home. Someone has invented a machine
that can talk like we do, a ghost that can paint your landscape
if you feed it a few crumbs. The chicken soup and antiseptic stench
 
will stand in for neglect when I tour the daycare next year.
We’re not good at this. What will the machine say if I feed it
the baby’s plump wrists, her antique middle name. That night, I looked
 
into a mirror I could only reach with a key. I said to the woman
who appeared in its square, you can do hard things. I wore
a favorite sweater which can’t be a favorite anymore. The marsh
 
kept swaying slowly. The baby learning to stand. If I want you to care,
I have to keep pointing like that. Like a child. Bullet points: it was night,
no one was there. The baby lived and she died. The machine offers

the word threshold. The trees halo in real close. There are signs
everywhere, but none of them tell you where to go. If this is going to mean
something once it’s over, you have to understand the science—
 
we spend five months inside our grandmother’s bodies, as eggs
inside our unborn mothers. It is for this first body I wept as it stopped
breathing under fluorescent light. There is no ghost in the machine, no
 
embryo’s ghost inside that one. It’s just us, our unending voices.
On the worst night of my life, I was both alone and not. The headlights
formed a halo around my car in the dark. My belly percussed like a drum.

—Caitlin Cowan

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