I looked into your milky blue depths. Your whole inner self up there on that glowing screen while the doctors rushed around. The two segments of your brain each have their own lumpy outline. They don’t look like you. They have none of your smoothness, your parabolic curves. The only thing that reminds me of you is the tulip shape of your fallopian tubes, the budding of your ovaries. How strange that you carry all your potential children around with you. If I knew what I was looking at, I could tell you when to start to worry, when to ask me about where things are going, where’s my head at, do I see a future.

My potential children have a turnover rate nearly equal to the versions of you that have passed through my life. If they leave, more will take their place. Sometimes I wonder if my sperm know this when they follow their urge to swim upstream and are instead trapped like factory-farmed salmon.

You can’t teach a four-year-old about evolution and reproduction in the same breath but my mother did and the two concepts became bound together. All life grew out of the sea but I grew out of you, I used to think when I looked at her. How could that be? Time, to a child, whether it’s five minutes or five thousand years, all has the same fuzzy bendability. Maybe when I emerged I was a horseshoe crab. Maybe you were an elaborately reticulated seahorse.

About Chandra Steele

Chandra Steele has been published in Vol. 1 Brooklyn, Newtown Literary, been a finalist in L Magazine’s Literary Upstart series, talked with Banana Yoshimoto in The Scofield, had a novel make it to the semifinals of the Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award, and won the MTV Write Stuff competition. She’s drunk kvass and eaten Jesus Harvest Seeds and lived to tell people about it on McSweeney’s Internet Tendency. Rick Moody once said she wrote the best description of a racetrack he has ever read. She has never been to a racetrack. You can find her work on chandrasteele.com

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