killer cat, rubs against Birdâs leg.
âYou want my happy baby, donât you? You canât have her, not in a million years.â
In a million years, Bird thinks, what will the planet look like? What, in another ten?
She walks on, feeling lighter, sobering up. She shakes out her shirt in a sunshiny field and they lie on it, Bird on her back and the baby on Birdâs chest, one heart bumping into the other. Sheâd like to sleep here, wake in falling dew. The baby holds up her head to look at Bird, to gnaw on Birdâs chin, but now sheâs tiredâspent beyond wanting and soft all at once. Everything in that baby gives way.
It is the dearest crushing feeling.
Bird makes a roll bar of her elbows and rolls with the baby against her, gently down the hill.
âDonât be afraid,â she says, âlike your mama. Love and be done with it. Let go. Hold on,â she says, âmay you always.â
The baby is lying on her back, batting at Birdâs face, the silver heads of the grasses nodding all around.
âIâll eat you up,â Bird says, âYouâre too pretty. You mustnât be ashamed to be pretty. Donât be proud. People will envy you; you have to let them. People will hate youâyou let them. Donât let them take anything from you, my girl. Theyâll take everything. You have to give yourself away.â
Bird kisses the babyâs pinkening cheeks, the knob of her spitty chin.
âBe good to yourself, my little lollipop. Never love a boy like Mickey. I donât mean that.â
She presses her mouth against the babyâs creamy belly.
âWhat I mean, lollipop, is love him. Love him hard and be done.â
Bird picks the baby up, puts her shirt back on. The ferns are withering, sweetening the air.
âLove me,â Bird says, âyou have to promise. Promise me you will write to me when you are all gone away and grown.â
They go inside, the kitchen dim, hard at first to see. First thing Bird sees is the telephone and she picks it up to call Mickey, hangs it up again. A grown woman. Christ above. Sheâs got a baby. She shakes. She is shaking that baby too.
She tries Suzie. She wants to tell Suzie the sound Mickey made, the girlish, dry, collapsing gasp when he took her. But Suzie will say, âI know.â
âHeâs got pinworms.â
âMickey?â
âMy boy,â Bird says.
âIâll let you go,â Suzie says.
âCome on, Suzie. You donât want to know about pinworms? Quiet pale morsels you can see through, small as a grain of rice.â
The pinworm eats at night, the pediatrician told Bird. âTake a look with a flashlight while heâs sleeping,â she advised. âThey break apart as they leave the bodyâlittle fellows, friable, sliding out of the hole.â
âIâm not all that wild about humans,â Suzie says. âWeeat each other. We donât behave. We thought to send Mexican free-tailed bats into Japan loaded down with napalm in the second world war. Dragged them out of their caverns. Put them on ice so theyâd sleep. Another shining human endeavor to rival the exploding harpoon.â
Suzie takes a drag on something. Bird can hear it over the phone.
âThere are too fucking many of us besides, and you and Doctor Said So just went and made two more.â
âSo get your tubes tied, you donât like humans,â Bird says. âBe done with it.â
âRight. Never give blood again.â
Suzie takes another drag and a swig of something that comes in a glass with ice.
âWhen humans get wiped off the planet,â Suzie says, âdo you know this? The subways in New York City will engorge with sea water in days.â
âWhen?â Bird says.
âWhat?â
â When humans get wiped off the planet ,â Bird says. âDonât people still say if ?â
âMatter of time,â Suzie