I’ll begin here: In the past, I’ve deployed the lazy riposte You can’t be half pregnant when others waver in their commitments. Yet my commitment to pregnancy has always been a half-formed thing. When they ask Are you trying I say only My IUD is out.

All this to say I am “trying” to the extent that I am “not impeding,” but not in the sense of “active pursuit.”

More than that, though. I am also “not trying” because I know my mother’s quiet history. The years and years without. With absence, yes, but with time enjoyed not-mothering, too. Then miscarriage. Then me, a daughter. And isn’t that an inheritance a daughter can trust? I’ve inherited everything else.

Even so, I fear the disappointment I court. I can smell it I tell R who is also “trying” but harder or better than me because she knows when she’s ovulating. We speak on the phone. R in Perth where we are both from, and me in Paris where S is from. I ask her how we might avoid the monthly creep that we lack something. We hang up, then R calls back. To tell me she’s pregnant, confession-like. How many weeks I ask, already seduced by this mode of counting.

Inside me, unknown to me, a count has already begun. When everything begins to smell—everything, with sudden violence—a plastic test doused in pee announces another place to begin. Five weeks I tell my mother who says I won’t tell the family yet.

I say to S in a panic I don’t want a boy. He says It scares me when you say that. His tone invites me to feel something akin to shame. And it comes. Then it goes. It seems to me that the preference had to be expelled from my body in language. Left to dwell at a little distance from my body. Be observed and understood.

When I was nineteen, I dreamt I had a son. This was not a son with S’s long lashes, but a son with curly hair, like J. With a sticky hand in mine, and wearing the colours of J’s favourite football team. I told J about our dream-son the next morning, and summoned him sporadically over our decade together, a ballast to early-20s misshapen love. His potential gave us air to breathe. But a dream-son can’t hold up the sky. After the breakup, I summoned him once more because I wanted to mourn the future I’d ended. But even a dream-son weighs heavy. We don’t really talk now.

At night, I wake myself when I turn my body. Something pulls in pain, deep inside, on the right. An ovary, maybe. A uterine ligament. A fallopian tube. I reach for my phone and google right side pain early pregnancy. The results begin with normal and end with ectopic. I imagine the implanted cells multiplying into a embryo inside my fallopian tube. Growing and gorging on the toast and dry crackers that don’t nauseate me. I see the tube split. The internal bleeding, the disbanded cells. The death inside me.

I learnt early that a body might kill. Especially those parts that have for so long marked a body for motherhood. At nineteen, T taught me this. Her body did. The cancer cells that multiplied into a tumour inside her ovary, they taught me. Growing and gorging on the berries and the soy milk that were meant to delay death. The tumour splitting in the surgeon’s hand, the fluid spilling into the open cavity. Her body, her belly, emptied. I’ve felt her body’s betrayal heavy in mine in the years since.

My ovaries ached twice after T died. The first time, still in Perth, I told my doctor I know what this is. She said it was psychosomatic but referred me for an ultrasound anyway. There I was, reclined. Surrounded by student radiographers who leered at a monitor behind my head. My ovaries were fine, but I learnt that I was born with a retroverted uterus. The second time, by now in New York, I didn’t tell my doctor about T, didn’t let her think it was “all in my head,” too. In a dimly lit room that gaped around a paper-covered chair, a technician found a cyst on my right ovary. Round. Simple, she said. She wasn’t meant to tell me this, but she could see my worry. It’ll resolve itself she said, and it did, but I learnt that my IUD caused ovarian cysts.

Agnes. Emma. Greta.

As I share my “news,” I encounter different versions of myself, realising that the advice I withdraw from each of my far-flung friends is tailored to the different, contradictory desires I’d deposited with them over the years. It’s not that I had been lying. To them or myself. It was an experiment to see which desires fit me best. So with R in Perth, my pregnancy is a wish fulfilled. Twinned with hers, we compare our September due dates, the foods and drinks you can and can’t ingest. My list from the French doctor is short so she sends me hers. Pages long and colour-coded. C in Montreal reminds me of my “options” and I like hearing that I have options. It lets me dwell a little longer in a parallel life where my time remains mine, my body, too. I turn her words over like fallen leaves, examine their veins. She tells me about her friends who grapple with not wanting their pregnancies in countries where abortion is illegal. I find myself in a country where abortion is legal, but “want” is a verb that confuses or ill-fits the context. The context being my body. M in Perth, a doctor, suffers the medical questions I sneak into our conversation under the cover of friendship, feminist critique and personal doubt. She does not think she would enjoy having children and in delicious denial or conspiracy I say Me neither.

My gynaecologist’s office is on the first floor of an apartment building at the edge of Paris. The lift is broken so S and I enter through the ground floor, which is more tunnel than hallway, covered with small brown tiles. Like one giant tablet of Cadbury’s milk chocolate. I say to S Let’s make a film here. He takes out his phone and I correct his grip to landscape. In the waiting room, masked, we keep our distance from another couple, despite the proximity of our trajectories evidenced by the full belly between them. Quashing my compulsion to compare the weeks we’ve each accrued.

Inside, my doctor directs me to take off my jeans and underwear. She puts lube on an ultrasound wand and breathes the word Respire. This first ultrasound is not over my belly like in the movies but inside. From this vantage point, she makes the pregnancy real by saying the fertilised egg came from my left ovary. Reality is made by such details, and I strain to remember which of T’s ovaries held the cancer. The doctor then turns her attention to my uterus. I think a dial is turned, but that is only because the sound of a heartbeat begins to fill the room. A fast, stuttering thing. I hold my breath waiting for it to stop because it seems to me that, once started, all it can do is stop. All the while, S films the scene. Sends the video to my parents. My mother sure it’s a boy, this seven-week blot on a mounted flat screen. Outside, the heartbeat still thrums in my ears and I hold my breath. Panicked, too, that all it can do is continue.

Even so. When I pee, I look for blood. In the bowl. On the damped toilet paper. I tell S I’m scared of the toilet. I am not sure I want a child but I don’t want death inside me.

Jessica. Lola. Naomi.

We go to Toulouse so S can scout locations for a film. We leave our first AirBnB because the wooden bathroom bench is covered in black mould and I can’t stop thinking about toxic spores. In our second AirBnB, I spend most of the week in bed partly because everything has been shuttered by the pandemic, but mostly because I am seasick and bone tired. I watch Alien, Aliens and Alien 3 because people say pregnant women shouldn’t and I’m like “fuck it.” I don’t watch Alien Resurrection because people say it’s crap and my time is precious.

Ripley. Sigourney. Rebecca.

In my Toulousian cocoon of quilts and soft pillows, I become alienated from my body, no longer recognising its inflated form and new operations, which run on an ancient autopilot. Alienated but inescapable. I inhabit it, this now-foreign “geography closest in.”1 I feel ill I say. My mother-in-law tells me pregnancy is not an illness and I begin to wonder what is illness if not this? I am all queasiness and exhaustion. All pangs and pulls and temperature.

The year T and I were born, a film called The Seventh Sign was released. I didn’t see it then, of course, but some years later with my parents in another room. Demi Moore plays Abby, a pregnant woman who must stare down an apocalypse beyond motherhood. God’s grace, we are told, has evaporated and with it new souls for the coming generations. It’s within Abby’s power to save humanity by dying for her son. A good mother, she consents, transferring her soul to him. This time it is not the Son who is called upon to sacrifice himself. (The Father already suffered that loss once.) This time it is the Mother, and she answers unflinchingly. She invites death into her body and restores the possibility of all life. This film terrified me as a child because I knew I would answer God’s call differently and that mine was the wrong answer.

Abby. Demi.

To meet the limit of what I am willing to sacrifice and find that limit in my own skin, flesh and bone. To resist the commonsense that my answer will change when the same skin, same flesh, same bone, extends around another life.

With my computer balanced on three pillows, I lean against the plush of my bed’s headboard searching the internet for ambivalent mothers. When dull cramps begin to spread across my abdomen, I clear the search and type dull cramps abdomen first trimester. I read “this happens” in three different articles and so, satisfied, return to scrolling the testimonies of women who, a decade ago, confessed their doubts and misgivings about impending motherhood.

A little later, I find blood in my underwear. A light scratch of brownish-red on cotton.

A stern-sounding woman on a state-run medical hotline advises us to go to the hospital. In a bag, I pack a red ring binder that holds our ultrasound and my blood results. I pack an apple. Red, too. I tell S not to worry, Your people are renowned hypochondriacs. He drives faster. When we arrive at Urgences gynécologiques obstétricales, we learn it is now a closed ward because of the pandemic. Only patients are buzzed through so I am buzzed through while S stays behind. This, the final word to those who insist it’s “we” who are pregnant. Just before I cross the threshold I turn to him and ask How do I say it in French again?

Miscarriage weighs heavy as a word. In English, the prefix “mis,” when applied to a part of speech, means “ill,” “wrong,” “badly,” “incorrectly,” or it marks a negation. So, I either carried badly, or simply stopped carrying altogether. Stopped carrying from embryo to foetus to baby. From inside to outside. It’s difficult not to hear it as an indictment of a body that doesn’t do what it’s supposed to. A body that failed. I like the French better, though it has its problems, too. One “does” une fausse couche. Literally, I guess, a false “lie down.” Like a false start. On this register, my body was just too eager.

The words S gives me are not really mine and so they rest lightly in the soft part of my mouth. They sink no deeper. When I reach the nurses’ station, Je fais une fausse couche rattles off my teeth. A triage nurse nods solemnly and guides me into a small room. Takes my blood pressure. The cuff expands like a floatation device and all I can think about are nouns and verbs until she asks me to rate my pain. Six sur dix I offer, with nothing to compare it to.

In another room, lit more by the street lamps outside than those on the ceiling, I undress from the waist down, anticipating the instruction. A plastic chair is covered in paper roll. It rips a little under my bare bum. A doctor who tells me her name is Anaïs puts a condom on the ultrasound wand. An intern stands guard by the monitor, nameless. S bursts into the room, my bag limp over his shoulder. I insisted he pants and I say You’re so dramatic. The wand inside me probes for signs of life. I look at the ceiling while the others look inside me. The doctor says Il y a toujours un battement. And there, on the screen, a silent little flicker, battling on.

She won’t make the heartbeat audible because overusing the doppler device can harm a foetus and mine is already too small. Too small for its eleven weeks. All those weeks with a beating heart not growing. You can, after all, be half pregnant.

It could be that the measurements are off, that the hospital’s ultrasound machine is differently calibrated to my gynaecologist’s. A slice of hope, and I can see S hungry for it. We’ll only know after a follow up in one week so the doctor writes a prescription for another ultrasound which I take from her along with a tissue to wipe myself down, not really believing the theory offered. S hands me the bottoms and socks I’ve neatly folded. Once dressed, I see the intern still staring at the image of my uterus. Asks C’est rétroverti and I nod. She looks surprised by my fluency. In my body.

Anaïs.

The next morning I say I have something to tell you. My mother cries down the line in anticipation, and cries again as the gap between anticipation and reality is closed. By me. By the words I say. I almost laugh, like I’ve delivered the lines of a play poorly. My mother fences in her sadness by adjusting her voice. Says Oh, sweetie and I think it’s she who’s forgotten the lines because I’ve never been called “sweetie” before.

Later the nausea, the fatigue, the full-feeling-heaviness lift like fog and I know that means the small vibrating heartbeat I saw has gone with them. Battle over. It was not, after all, the machine. I keep this to myself. That I am myself again. Alone in my body again. That night, I give a presentation over Zoom for a symposium in another time zone. It strikes me as a “resilient” thing to do.

At breakfast, when blood doesn’t come, S wonders aloud if everything might, in fact, be fine. I keep my own confidence until my body answers some minutes later. Beneath the table, I feel something unstoppable shift inside me. I lurch forward, as if to undo its momentum. To catch myself. In the bathroom, I pull down my pyjamas and sit over the white of the toilet bowl. Clots drop from me like rotten fruit. Like shit, really. I feel their slinky travel downward and their plop beneath me. I scream because gravity is intolerable and I am all excess, bottomless red.

The red things are still in my bag from the previous day’s emergency trip. This time we park on a steep hill out the front and I ask S if there isn’t a better spot, alarmed by the creaking of the car’s metal, unsure the handbrake will hold. I forget the car the moment we pass through the glass doors. S doesn’t negotiate his entry this time, he’s the only reason I’m standing. I walk, unsteady, to the bathroom. Struggle with the lock. Another gush. Unstoppable. I peel off my leggings revealing Rorschach blotches on both thighs. I bleed on the blue linoleum. On the seat. The blood dripping into the water like dye, diffuse and rose, then like paint, thick. Red.

A fistful of paper towels soaking red. What is this impulse? Of a woman, bleeding wildly, to stoop low and wipe the floor clean of herself.

Lying on my back, on the uncomfortable gurney, the clots slide out prompted by the doctor’s speculum. Like fish along a wet deck, slimy and shivering, out on a gush of liquid warmth. Warmth trickling somehow backward along my bum pooling under the small of my back. Still, no one says it’s a miscarriage. Not even une fausse couche. I stagger when I chance to pee, dropping another trembling clot in the short distance between gurney and bathroom. Can I confess my great, careless pleasure in all this lost blood? In this pressed-downward-feeling.

The doctors speak directly to S now, fatigued by the pace of my French comprehension under the fuzzy spell of drugs and blood loss. I understand the gist of what is being said, just not the concrete consequence. For example, I understand that something is wrong and something must be done. I miss that I am haemorrhaging and must have surgery, so there are several minutes when S knows more about my body or, rather, what will happen to it, than I do. Still no one has said une fausse couche even though I know and S knows it must be that. When S asks a kind nurse she says only Probablement.

I cry, not for my motherhood but for my mother because it’s early morning in Perth and her phone is silenced. I can’t tell her how I’ve grown suspicious of the pressed-downward-feeling, not knowing where the bottom is. I hear the orderly tell S that he’s going to take me to la salle de rêve to wait while my operating room is prepped. I smile my droopy face at S and he takes the change as an uneasy permission to relax his. I say It’s cute you call it the dreaming room here. S doesn’t want to take more from me tonight but corrects me, gently, It’s la salle de réveil not rêve.

Will I dream I ask the anaesthetist anyway. She says some people do. She says you come out feeling the way you did going under. Think about “pretty things” she suggests so I think about my grandfather’s beach house in its sleepy slice of Australia. Where my body was all summer’s baking heat and sun-drunk flies bumping into sweaty limbs. Where I lost those same limbs into winter’s knee high seaweed dumps and wooly clouds threatened to wash the beach and me away entirely. The house was sold a decade ago, but my mother likes to tell me of her visits there as she sleeps. The time difference between us affords an opportunity. I make a plan to meet her there, on the wooden bench atop a dune, overlooking the calm slate water that mingles, eventually, with the Indian Ocean.

Waiting waiting waiting. I hold my stomach in goodbye, sick with a breed of loneliness that comes from falling out with one’s body.

In theatre, the orderly directs me off the gurney that has been my blooded bed these past five hours and onto another, wider bed he’s pressed against it. Like two boats docking on the ocean. I lift my bum and scuttle across in an unsteady bridge pose. It’s strange, almost unpleasant, to wield power over my body having relinquished it. My movements are rusty. A sedate thrill prickles me as a nurse takes control again, quietly moving each of my four limbs to take up the whole space of the bed. Making me a kind of squashed star. Without warning, she puts an oxygen mask over my nose and mouth, and I struggle against it because I’m convinced something more should be said or done before I’m plunged under. J’ai peur I manage. The nurse smiles. Perhaps in sympathy or maybe at the inevitability of what is to come. She presses the mask harder to my face while a new anaesthetist busies himself in the crook of my arm, harnessing me to yet more clear tubes.

In theatre again or, rather, still in theatre, a doctor tells me my operation was “successful,” by which she means I’ve been scraped clean. Scraped back to zero weeks. I say Vous étiez dans mon rêve and her eyes smile above her mask. A succession of breaks in the ceiling above my head throb and pulse as I am wheeled underneath from this dreaming room back to the recovery room and, eventually, to a room of my own.

Alone, in the dark, I call my mother when I’m sure she’s awake. I should sleep but I’m enjoying too much the anaesthesia drugs, warming my veins and fogging my head. I tell her about my dream. You weren’t there I say and she begins to cry, just a little. She remembers her own miscarriage, how my father wheeled her into the hospital. How the heartbeat was already gone. This, I learn, happened after me, not before. (Sweetie, I think, you confused your inheritance all along!) This, I learn, happened shortly after her own mother died. (Sweetie, really, how lucky you are to still have your mother!) At a distance, but alive. I tell her I’m lucky which I believe in my belly. Because she’s alive and I’m alive and the proof is all that warm red that still flows from me onto the hospital pad wedged between my legs. Life. Fleshed and blooded. Miscarriage can be vivifying.

The drugs retreat and so do the night’s revelations. I am what’s left on the beach at low tide. Bright sun burns my cheek through the window so I turn full-faced toward the hanging orb, desirous to even things out. A young nurse with multiple crucifix tattoos takes my temperature, blood pressure and more blood while her supervisor watches and enters the numbers into a boxy computer. I ask them to remove the port in my arm, but they won’t remove it till my haemoglobin results come back. In case I need a transfusion, they explain. The port, though. It’s unbearable. I can’t help but think of T’s scraped veins. How they became less and less forthcoming.

The sun has risen higher when three doctors knock on my open door. Enter without hesitation. An intern, whose smiling eyes I remember from theatre, speaks to me in English while the other doctors look at the floor like bored children in front of a class. She tells me We removed some tissue which makes me think something remains so I say Some and she says All. Still no one names what happened in either language. The senior doctor whispers something to the intern which the intern readily translates. This is very common, statistically speaking.

How to respond to a singular experience at once so common, statistically speaking?

In the car, S hands me a new copy of Jane Eyre and a croissant. He calls them my cadeaux pour courageux. As he drives, I flick to my favourite, reddest part. Rochester’s words to Jane, repurposed for my recent experience: I have a strange feeling with regard to you. As if I had a string somewhere under my left ribs, tightly knotted to a similar string in you. And if you were to leave I’m afraid that cord of communion would snap. And I have a notion that I’d take to bleeding inwardly. Falling pastry flakes make greasy bookmarks on these pages. At home, the gifts continue. In the fridge, a wheel of my favourite cheese. Soft, unpasteurised. Until a day ago it was forbidden. S seasons a roast beef and pops it in the oven for barely-minutes. For iron he soothes. Blood seeps from the rare meat on my plate and I realise I don’t have the courage for his gifts.

There’s real violence in suddenly not being what you were a day before. My body is a site of something I don’t fully understand so I catalogue it like a crime scene. Inner thighs stained yellow with iodine. Neck stiff when rolled back. Arms blued and purpled by needle-point. Back of hand, too. Hips sore when sat cross-legged. Cervix still dilated. Bleeding less, but still bleeding. In the first hours home from hospital, people call to say that I can “try again” as if inviting this risk—this death inside me—a second time could possibly bring me comfort. I draw a line around my body, make it invisible, impervious to their suggestion.

I seek out stories among my friends. Some known to me, others emerge in the wake of my own testimony. L in Geneva tells me how the heartbeat inside her was already gone when she lay down for her scan. How she’d had no bleeding, no lifting fog giving her notice. How she crawled into bed with chocolate and bad television. How it hurt her to see photos of other babies in the long, slow days that followed. But our conversation is short. She has to get off the line to care for her baby. The baby that came after. I message R a little later. I tell her we can still talk about her pregnancy because I can hold her happiness and my sadness together. I worry that this might not be true so I inscribe it in words to make it true.

L sends us fancy chocolates and I take them to bed as instructed, binging television shows about the medieval queens of Europe whose misbehaving bodies changed the course of history. Inoculating myself against the image of my blood with the image of theirs. Staining my eyes with the blue light of my computer. Blue as far from red as possible. From red on white. On porcelain bowls. On grey tiles and linoleum hospital floors. Red on tissue. Tissue on tissue. Red dripping. Dropping. Endless endless red red red.

The plastic sleeves of my red ring binder cling to each other as I search for our ultrasound. It sounds like muted thunder in my hands, the crackle and slap crackle and slap of each sleeve turned one way and then the next. Frantic. I suck at the air realising it’s lost, too. S says Don’t do this to yourself as if I ever had the power to do anything to myself. Asks Is it important because he knows it is but doesn’t want it to be. Because he gave our ultrasound to the kind nurse and never retrieved it. He shrinks from me into the other room, quietly calls the hospital to learn the fate of the folded piece of paper, but no one keeps track of such things. Quietly calls my gynaecologist’s office for a copy that they email within minutes. Asks Is electronic okay? And it is okay because that storm has already passed from me. Because I am now swamped with a kind of stunned relief that I am sad. Not for the emptying of myself, but for the complete erasure of what once existed inside. The limits of my ambivalence found in the aftermath of its loss.

S watches me as I emerge from the bedroom still sore and battle weary. He watches as I pour a guiltless cup of coffee and gulp down the day’s first paracetamol. What I ask, finally wearied by his watchful waterblue eyes. He says The 12-week ultrasound would’ve been today and I remember, with beautiful shame, that we share in last week’s losses. I’d forgotten I say.

Forgot the appointment but not the week. All those weeks adding up to—not to nothing, but not to a baby. Weeks are hardly a useful unit to count in now. How else might I measure this experience? In plastic chairs covered in paper? In ultrasound wands? In pints of blood lost? In phone calls to the women I most want near? S says he’s worried we won’t “try” again and I grope for words to reassure him without meaning any of them. Because if we were to “try” again, it could never again be naïve. Never not counting. There will be days to count and cycles to measure in months. And then, maybe, weeks to count again. Weeks and weeks holding our breath.

Pregnant women are warned off the Alien franchise for the wrong reason. They don’t need shielding from parasites and burst ribcages but from what happens at the interstices of Aliens and Aliens 3. In Aliens, Sigourney Weaver’s Ripley finds a human colony decimated by the xenomorphs and, among the ooze and bones and debris, one lone survivor. A little girl called Rebecca, who prefers to be called Newt. Ripley promises Newt safety. Again and again the xenomorphs threaten it. Again and again and again. At the film’s end, Ripley puts Newt into a stasis pod next to hers. Plans to sleep it off. Motherhood is fatiguing. Aliens 3 begins with Ripley waking crash-landed on another planet. This time she is the sole survivor, Newt having died in her sleep. Just like that. All previous efforts erased, rendered moot.

S has a two-day shoot in Toulouse and he’s taking the earliest train out of Paris. He wakes at five in the morning so I wake at five in the morning, a consequence of the small space we share rather than solidarity. My eyes are half-glued with sleep which keeps out some of the white light of our bathroom. I pee and scroll my phone, turn down the brightness, check my email. And there almost lost among all my subscriptions, an email from J with his “news,” apropos nothing. A photo of his baby son on my phone, while I sit on the toilet into which I’d bled and bled and bled. You just can’t write this stuff I think.

I wait for an ugly feeling to come but it doesn’t come. Nothing comes. In this space of unfeeling, I give myself the choice of how to feel and I choose awe. I do. With the wild hopeful confidence possessed by the heartbroken. Those who trust “this too shall pass.” Because life has always been coloured fragile. Yes it has. But always sublime, too, when you retire the promise of destiny and think instead of all those chanced connections through time. All the meandering lives that led, somehow, to yours. The lives with which yours intersected, the lives from which yours fell apart. The missed connections which went as unmarked as they were unknown, the lost loves endured and the new loves fostered in their wake. And the longer you imagine the stretch of human history, the more fragile-sublime it becomes. And if you expand this historical sweep beyond the human. Well, think only of all the plants and all the animals that had to live, grow and die to sustain your ancestors and their ancestors on their journeys. And so it went and so it goes. In what relation do I stand to J’s son? None, really. Yet the end of our relationship was a condition of his possibility. Just as it was of my pregnancy. We are all the ground, messed-up and meandering, from which new lives spring.

J’s email lets me imagine a spectral kind of motherhood, so I claim my ephemeral sons. The curly-haired, sticky-handed memory-of-a-dream-son. Lost years and years before. The September-maybe-son seeded by my left ovary. Lost at eleven weeks, three weeks ago.

But I only named a daughter. I find the names like bobby pins: everywhere and in inexhaustible supply. Never T’s name, though. That remains hers. But others. Names for infinite daughters at the absent-minded ends of old shopping lists. In the scrawled margins of unfinished books. A sticky-note, full with my cursive. Proof, maybe, that my ambivalence waned many weeks before eleven. The names are like foreign words now, or I have been made foreign to them. Each discovery an unnaming. An undoing.

Telling this new “news” is an undoing of sorts. An exorcism maybe. I tell it again and again until I see all that red as if it were photographed in black and white. Until I am fluent in my miscarriage. Almost. There are still the words I stumble over, my tongue unsure of where to land. For example, I vacillate between “foetus” and “child” unresolved about what it was that I once had and how to designate it. The first is too dull for the colour of my grief and the second sounds like make-believe, so I borrow “le fils” from S’s language, test it and make it stand for what I lost, knowing this trick offers him nothing at all. Knowing that it translates as “son” but, for my Anglophone-sogged brain, the depth of feeling implied by the English does not attach to the French. And it’s the incompleteness of its emotional translation, as if the signifier were somehow underwater, that captures the in-betweenness or not-quiteness of what happened in my body.

Despite the doctors’ words and the internet’s statistics, an intrusive thought settles between my ribs. It’s possible I caused this miscarriage. Eating something forbidden or showering too-long under too-hot water. Maybe putting words outside myself was not experimentation but temptation. What did I body forth when I wrote that I had invited death inside? Yes, I know the most likely explanation: That the end was in the beginning. But my little ribcage thought reserves some control for me, some direction for my feelings to go. Even if to blame myself.

I read online the testimonies of women who share this quiet history of stalled weeks, willing their secret cures to become mine. Counting how many weeks they’d been pregnant, like runs on the board. Counting, too, how many weeks they’d never be pregnant. Weeks, the currency of this loss. It’s unfair to tally either way, of course. You can’t half miscarry I might say. The only cure I find among their words is the coming of another pregnancy, which feels impossible right now and begs the question: What is the object of grief after miscarriage? My body, mon fils, or motherhood itself?