1.
Your older sister, Bess, cracked a joke about the sorry state of your lawn, which is why a few months later
you decided to grow something. You had no interest in a garden, but you were very interested in proving Bess wrong, so on the first warm Saturday of the year, you found yourself wandering down the aisles of Target wrestling flaccid bags of soil, fetid-looking bulbs.
“Looks like someone has a green thumb,” the checkout lady said. It made you wonder if they trained people who worked there to say things like that, to make such bald observations. You watched her come across the little pregnancy test that you had snuck snugly between gardening supplies. You waited for her to say, “Looks like someone’s been ovulating!”
But she didn’t say that. She didn’t say anything at all. She just picked up the box, swiped it under the scanner’s light, and dropped it into the darkness of your sack.
2.
The word “sack” had been popping into your head a lot lately. Ever since November, when the doctor used it to describe the functions of the human uterus. Yours, in particular. “See here?” he said pointing to a diagram of the female reproductive system pulled up on his tablet. Tracing your belly in the appropriate places, he called it “sack-like.”
You had made the mistake of expressing out loud your anxiety that even if you did get pregnant again, at your age your body wouldn’t know how to hang on to it, to keep it from slipping right out once more.
“But aren’t you going back on the Pill now anyway?” the doctor asked. “You had me call in a script— ”
“Yes, but,” you trailed off.
3.
After sex the first time you skipped a dose, you couldn’t sleep. You kept surreptitiously raising your hips off the mattress, thinking you could feel it working. Biology, gravity, whatever. When Mick asked why you were so fidgety, you said your lower back was bothering you. “I hate getting old,” you added truthfully.
Mick kept one hand on your belly, told you in a sleepy voice that you just needed to be kinder to yourself, more accepting of the way your body was maturing.
“Maturing? Maturing?” You inched your pelvis even higher under the sheets. “Jesus, is that how you think of me?” you said. “Mature?”
But he must have fallen asleep because, after that, he didn’t answer.
4.
You contemplated for a long time that night and in the end decided to forgo one more pill, maybe two. No more than three, tops. Next to you, Mick snored away, blissfully untroubled.
Men, you’d read somewhere, could fall asleep easier than women. Didn’t have the same tendency for developing insomnia as they aged. Since turning forty, achieving restful sleep felt so often like too much work.
“Like an orgasm,” Bess sighed, when you mentioned it in passing.
“Not at all,” you said. Though it was a little bit true that that, too, had become difficult. That ever since you had started clandestinely charting your temperatures, your cycles, sex had become more…utilitarian than you and Mick were accustomed to.
“Zel, do you even want to be doing this right now?” Mick paused in the middle of it during month two or three of being secretly off birth control.
“Yes, of course!” you said. You put on a clownish porn face, made a joke. “Ooh, baby.”
Hovering above, Mick said, “Is everything alright? You’ve seemed a little…off.”
“I’m fine,” you said. Using those hips of yours, you gently nudged him back on track.
You closed your eyes as he finished. In your mind, you could see that small pencil hidden in your bedside table, the discreet little journal where you marked it all down.
5.
Before you brought in the packages from Target, you were careful to hide the test out of sight. It jangled in your pocket as you gingerly dragged the bags through the kitchen. There really were a lot of them. Mick grimaced. “At least you’re not getting carried away.” He bent down, inspecting, foraging through your purchases.
“For starters,” he said, “you forgot gardening gloves.”
Though he was almost ten years younger, Mick often seemed like the older one, the more sage, in your relationship. You chalked it up to his profession. An instructor at the local community college, he was used to telling other people what to do. Lending his influence. One by one, he rattled off more things you neglected to get, using his long fingers to count.
“A hose big enough to reach the spot. Some paper bags for brush. A rake to clear up the plot.” He ran those fingers through his handsome hair. “Zel, this really feels like one of those things you didn’t think all the way through.”
You did not, in fact, think it all the way through. And you did not feel like going back to Target. You were sort of hoping Mick would volunteer to go by the store himself. Or at least make plans to tackle the project alongside you. But he was already halfway out the door for office hours before you could ask.
The screen slammed, then quickly opened once again. Mick’s head of handsome hair poked back through. Those thick locks that inspired so many jealous jokes among your friends and their balding husbands. The hair that, when Bess had first laid eyes upon it, made her pull you aside to say, “How much younger is he?” Then, “There’s such a thing as too handsome.” Then, “Better put a leash on that one.” Mick didn’t need a leash, you knew, but it was true that his students could get a little attached from time to time. It was only natural, what with that storybook hair of his.
“Oh, and a spade,” Mick added.
You must have looked confused because then he said, “A sort of baby shovel.”
6.
You thought you’d seen such a baby shovel somewhere in the garage. You went poking behind the tower of bins stacked along one wall. All of them containing baby clothes from Bess’s house. Mick didn’t want to keep them in the garage at first. He wanted them away from the house. In storage. He thought it was “macabre” and “a lot of pressure” to have them hanging over your heads like that, especially when the two of you hadn’t even decided if you would try again. But you reasoned with him. “It would be a shame to pay all that money to store them when we have the room,” you said. “Besides, who knows? We may end up needing them sooner rather than later.”
“More later than sooner,” he pointed out. “If at all.”
You let that last part go without comment. You knew Mick thought he was only trying to keep you from disappointment, more hurt. It was very sweet, that protective streak of his.
7.
Secretly, you thought it was providential that Bess had suggested you take the clothes in the first place. It wasn’t like she knew anything about your growing pile of undigested pills hidden from Mick in your bedside table. She just happened to bring it up one day. You were in her garage after the holidays, having used the entry code she gave you for emergencies, admiring, as you were wont to do sometimes, those small sleeves in cotton candy hues, all those darling collars. When she appeared in the doorway, Bess was so stealthy, you almost jumped.
“Aren’t you supposed to be at work?” she asked.
“Aren’t you?” you answered. You began to calmly fold the baby clothes, to put them away as if it were the most natural thing in the world for you to do so.
“One of the twins is sick. I had to pick her up from daycare.” Bess looked strangely. “What’s going on?”
You grabbed a yard stick off her floor. “Just looking for one of these,” you lied, badly. “I thought I saw one here.” She furrowed her brow, pursed her lips.
“Say,” you went on, before she could ask anything else, “what are you planning to do with all of these clothes anyway?” When she didn’t answer, you continued, “It’s not like you need them anymore. They’re just sitting here, taking up valuable space.” You grimaced ever so slightly at the yummy chaos of her life all around you. For good measure, you stuck out your sneaker and toed gently at a stroller wheel. “You could always store them at our place,” you said. “We have the room.”
“Wouldn’t that be, I don’t know, weird for you? Mick said you two were still undecided about—”
You waved your hand, cutting her off. “Not at all. No problemo,” you said as you picked up the bins. One by one you started hauling them away.
8.
Around the back of the bins, there wasn’t a spade, but there was a dowel. Something left over from one of Mick’s student’s old woodworking projects. Your garage was dotted with such odds and ends from his semesters’ past. Knick-knacks, treasures from students he had been especially close with. You tried to get him to throw them out, to declutter such miscellany for when you would eventually need that space.
Not that you weren’t understanding. You recognized that he tended to get attached to his work in a way you did not. But sometimes it bothered you that he was so sentimental about unimportant things, so sappy about those students of his.
“You should be thinking about family,” you reminded him. “In a way, the students are my family,” he said.
“Yes, we all know you’re very close.”
He closed his eyes. Exhaled. Then after a moment, he added, “I told you that you have nothing to worry about.” He said, “What do you want me to do? Stop office hours?
Turn away every attractive student who asks for help? I’m a teacher. It’s my job.”
Later, as he was taking out the trash he said, “Look, and don’t even think of turning this into another case for the baby thing again. Getting pregnant won’t fix the problem because there is no problem to fix.”
You didn’t know why he said that this time. You hadn’t even broached the topic.
9.
You pushed the soil bags in a wheelbarrow to the far corner of the property near the shed you abandoned painting last year. Over the fence, the neighbor woman was getting ready for work. Sheila or Shirley or something. She’d moved in next door only a little while after you and Mick, but you still didn’t know her name. Mid-fifties, unmarried, she lived alone. When she first drove up, solo in her moving van, you told Mick it seemed like too much house for just one person. Even such a formidable person as she. You made a joke about her height, her dowdiness, her tight, unstylish Marx brothers curls. Behind closed doors, you started calling her Harpo. Harpo was an EMT, so she kept odd hours, was home for long stretches of time on afternoons when other people normally worked. Which is why it made sense that you would go to her that day, a few weeks after Halloween, when the terrible pain began. That you would knock on her door when the bleeding started and wouldn’t stop. You didn’t know what else to do. No matter how many times you called it, Mick’s phone only rang and rang.
Harpo took one look at the wet on your thighs and pulled you close, guided you over her doorstep. You hadn’t meant for her to take you in. Only your knees were shaking too hard for you to drive yourself to the hospital.
Now, in the sunny yard, you concentrated on the ground. You ripped into the soil bags, avoiding Harpo’s eye, but you could feel her watching you over the fence. “Howdy,” she said.
*
“Howdy back,” you answered. You lived in a neighborhood where people said things like that. A friendly place, it was part of the appeal for buying there. It was wholesome, you told Mick. Perfect for raising families.
“What are you planting?” she asked, and it occurred to you that you didn’t know the names of the flower bulbs you purchased. All those bags featuring unfurling buds, you’d found yourself just grabbing for ones that featured words like “EZ grow!” You held up a package and shrugged.
“Well, I bet they’ll look gorgeous when they bloom,” Harpo said brightly. She had a tendency to try to get chatty, to go on like that around you, overly-chipper. You weren’t friends, but ever since that day you knocked at her door, she seemed to think you were. As if taking your blood pressure had somehow bonded you to her, made you one of her kin. “I probably shouldn’t be telling you this but I, um, had a similar thing happen to me,” she had said to you that dark afternoon as she pumped, pumped the little bulb of the blood pressure machine on your arm. “A couple of times, actually. To my ex and I. Years ago.” She stopped pumping then and the cuff began to loosen around you, releasing the pressure that built up. She studied her watch, moved her lips as she counted your heartbeats. You couldn’t look at her face while she did that to you. You stared at her curls. From close up, you were surprised by their sparseness. Thinning to the point of embarrassment, in some places you could see the skin of her scalp beneath.
“It gets easier over time,” she said gently as she tugged the Velcro cuff. A thousand little teeth snapped and tore open as they released. She smiled shyly. “I know it doesn’t seem like it.”
It was quiet in her big drafty house. So quiet with no one there but you. The sound of the Velcro lingered. When you stood up, you both looked down at the stain you left on the couch but neither of you said anything about it on the way to the hospital.
10.
You didn’t like lying to Mick, but it was one of those things that got a little easier every time you did it. Like skipping pills. Or calling in sick from work even when the doctor cleared you to return in the new year. After you did it once, it was no big deal to do it again and again.
You were losing interest in the temp agency where you worked anyway. You were in need of another change. You spent the slowly lengthening days driving around town, dreaming up other careers, lives that could be yours. Once, just for the hell of it, you drove to the daycare on the campus where Mick worked, the one for children of faculty and staff. It wasn’t that strange that you should show up because you had called them with questions about registering. Back in the fall when you and Mick thought you’d still need to. It would have been a convenient thing, you both agreed, to have Mick be able to drop off the baby on the way to class. When you arrived, dead-eyed and flat-bellied, you requested a tour and they didn’t ask any questions. They stuck a visitor’s badge on your shirt. It was story hour in the pre-school room. The children were being read “Jack and the Beanstalk.” It had been a long time since you heard that story, but you remembered how it went. It began with trouble over a cow who was dried up, could no longer give milk.
The only difference you could spot was in the threat made by the giant. “Fe fie fo fum,” said the teacher as she read, “I smell the blood of an Englishman.” But she stopped there. Nothing about grinding bones into bread. You guessed because the children were so young, the teacher skipped over the part about the giant wanting to eat Jack. You wondered if the story made sense with that one important part missing.
11.
A few weeks later, you tried to call out from the temp agency again, and your boss there finally let you go. You weren’t surprised, but you decided to celebrate your freedom by returning to campus. You parked outside the daycare, but this time couldn’t bring yourself to go in. You sat on a bench in front of it. It was a cool day, but nice, so you didn’t mind sitting for a spell. The breeze had that soft spring scent around its edges, the kind you only notice when you are trying to keep your mind off other things.
As you sat, parent after parent drove up and deposited their child inside, each plump cheek rosier than the last. Spring was coming fast and everything was beginning to flourish. Even Bess’s twins, once so tiny and bald in their preemie bassinets, now seemed to be growing, flippant as weeds. You reached out and pulled a handful of early buds off a tree branch. You tore the closed petals open and scattered them on the ground like tiny white tablets. In the distance, a campus security car flashed its lights, and you looked up, thinking of Harpo, alone in her cold house. Even that large scalp of hers still managing to valiantly push up its fine hairs. You weren’t sure how long you were there, but a lot of time must have passed because before you knew it, Mick was leaving his office. You saw him across the quad. You had a perfect view of his building from where you sat. He was moving in your direction, but he didn’t notice you at first because he was walking with one of his students. A pretty young thing. You stared at the pair of them feeling like a crone. You waited to catch them in a moment. When he bent his head to listen to the student speak, your spine tingled and you tried to will her lips closer to his ear, as if by magic. You wanted so badly for their skin to touch. To feel the electric shock of something else, anything else. A betrayal, even. But they kept a respectable distance the whole length of the walkway and when she turned to leave, there were no embraces, no longing looks. In the end, he didn’t so much as give her a second glance.
When Mick got close enough to finally notice you there on the bench, you felt more angry than foolish. Cheated, in some way. He sat down next to you, his hand was warm on your cold one. When he passed you a tissue and he insisted on taking you home, you didn’t object, didn’t wonder who would cover the rest of his classes. It was time, he said, for “a serious conversation.”
On the way back, he stopped at a drive-thru so that you could eat something. But you weren’t hungry. Not for that. The whole trip back you sat with that warm greasy sack wilting on your lap. His voice rose and then quieted several times over as he spoke. It was as if he were cycling through emotions—anger, sadness, tenderness—on a loop, like the colors projected on the ceiling from the baby mobile hanging in the daycare.
“Look, I know how much you want to try again. And I thought I would want to too. But, you see, after what happened…”
You nodded along as he said words like “second thoughts,” “time to reconsider,” and “be at peace with the fact that.” They were a jumble, these words. Nonsense. Fi, fie, fo, fum. “Circumstances can change. Plans can change.” He paused.
Then he added, not unkindly, “You’ve changed since we met.” You scoffed. “I’m older.”
But it didn’t seem like so very long ago when you first walked into Mick’s woodworking class, embarrassed to be the sole wrinkling face in a sea of fresh skin. You weren’t even sure what made you sign up for the course with all those young people in the first place. All you knew is that you felt the familiar weight of your years, your loneliness, beginning to bear down. That you needed a change of pace. A different path. You didn’t even like woodworking. It seemed so old-fashioned, like something out of a book. But for a fleeting moment, the promise of something new. Something to keep you from drowning in the monotony of yourself. That day, of all the students in the room, it was you that Mick came up to first, smiled at so warmly.
“Welcome,” he said. His eyes were so kind, and you thought, he will do.
“That’s not what I meant,” Mick was wrapping his knuckles tight around the steering wheel. “I didn’t mean older.”
“Okay, then, more mature,” you said.
Mick said he didn’t give a hill of beans about the age difference between you. His glossy hair caught the light as he struggled to find the words to describe the way your fickle desires, your restlessness, were choking him off. “Sometimes I wonder if this is really about having a family. I mean, you know how you can be. Flitting from one thing to the next. Interior decorating. Cosmetology certification. That spin bike in the spare room you never use.”
You pointed out that the last one hurt your back.
“My point is, even when you get what you want, it doesn’t seem to make you happy. Now it’s a family you think you’re missing. I didn’t even want to try to get pregnant in the first place, but you needled and needled. And look at us. I’m sorry but I just can’t do that again.”
It really was a beautiful head of hair. But you couldn’t listen to it anymore. You tuned out. Turned your face toward the window and allowed yourself to think back to that mobile in the daycare’s nursery. The serene space of those infant quarters. The babies in their bassinets laid out like seedlings in a plot, head to toe, toe to head.
“There are so many of them!” you breathed when you walked in, and the young student working there caught your eye, laughed.
“You’re telling me,” she said. “More than we know what to do with!”
When she said this, she snapped her gum a little too loudly and all the babies startled at once, held out their tiny hands, waving as if to say goodbye. Or hello.
12.
It was true that you could have probably thought through your newest project a little better. But you told yourself that even if you were too impatient, even if you did rush headlong into things, there was no harm in giving it a try anyway. Especially now that you’ve come this far.
You knelt in the dirt, managed to brush the ground free of leaves and sticks. You yanked weeds out by their roots. With bare hands, you turned the earth over, loosening and breaking apart the dried-up layer on top to get to the darker, nutrient-rich soil beneath. You were eager for the moment of the planting itself. To tuck those ugly lumps down, down into the craters you measured out with Bess’s yardstick, dug with the dowel.
The bulbs looked comically old and ordinary in the dirt. But they were sly, you knew, like magic seeds. It made strange sense, you thought as you covered them up, that children were always being eaten in stories. Was it really so odd to think babies delicious?
13.
Upstairs in the bathroom, you could feel the little test standing sentinel on its shelf, judging your efforts, marking your progress. You worked for a long time. You worked so hard. It was difficult business. The sun beat down on you. The dowel grew splintered in your hands. In the shadow on the ground, your back bowed out unflatteringly, like a peasant’s hump. When you tucked the last bulb from the endless bags deep into the earth, you felt suddenly glad to be done with it. The dirt, the toil. The physical labor of it all. Your body ached.
Your palms cracked and bled. When you rubbed them on your jeans, they left long, red streaks. Your spine, when you straightened it out, twinged ominously.
Walking into the dark of the house, your eyes went dim, then slowly readjusted. You felt lightheaded on your way to the bathroom. All the way up the steps, you had the vague notion that you should have tidied up the mess you left in the yard, but the truth was, you were out of patience for it. You hadn’t anticipated how tedious the job, how oppressive the heat. The day was unseasonably warm, as all days now seemed unseasonable and warm.
“It’s a shame,” Mick commented just before he pulled into
the driveway that day he picked you up from campus. The day of your “serious conversation.” You had passed a couple of trees on the edge of your neighborhood, half covered in buds, the other half, dead, or in the process of dying. You thought those trees were beautiful with those half-and-half limbs. It looked like they were fighting for something. One last spring. But Mick said he found it troubling. “Mixed up,” he called them, just before he dropped you off. Before he headed back to campus where his students, his family, waited for him with all the time in the world. “Poor things. It’s like they don’t even know what they want.”
He could be such a goddamned pessimist, you thought,
as you uncapped the little test stick, and squatting low, you winced just a little before kicking the door shut hard with your foot.
__________________________________
From Marvelous Freaks of Nature! by Alyson Mosquera Dutemple. Used with permission of the publisher, Cornerstone Press. Copyright © 2026.