Free The Shape of My Name by Nino Cipri

 
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    The year 2076 smells like antiseptic gauze and the lavender diffuser that Dara set up in my room. It has the bitter aftertaste of pills: probiotics and microphages and PPMOs. It feels like the itch of healing, the ache that’s settled on my pubic bone. It has the sound of a new name that’s fresh and yet familiar on my lips.
    The future feels lighter than the past. I think I know why you chose it over me, Mama.
    *   *   *
    My bedroom has changed in the hundred-plus years that have passed since I slept there as a child. The floorboards have been carpeted over, torn up, replaced. The walls are thick with new layers of paint. The windows have been upgraded, the closet expanded. The oak tree that stood outside my window is gone, felled by a storm twenty years ago, I’m told. But the house still stands, and our family still lives here, with all our attendant ghosts. You and I are haunting each other, I think.
    I picture you standing in the kitchen downstairs, over a century ago. I imagine that you’re staring out through the little window above the sink, your eyes traveling down the path that leads from the back door and splits at the creek; one trail leads to the pond, and the other leads to the shelter and the anachronopede, with its rows of capsules and blinking lights.
    Maybe it’s the afternoon you left us. June 22, 1963: storm clouds gathering in the west, the wind picking up, the air growing heavy with the threat of rain. And you’re staring out the window, gazing across the dewy fields at the forking path, trying to decide which way you’ll take.
    My bedroom is just above the kitchen, and my window has that same view, a little expanded: I can see clear down to the pond where Dad and I used to sit on his weeks off from the oil fields. It’s spring, and the cattails are only hip high. I can just make out the silhouette of a great blue heron walking along among the reeds and rushes.
    You and I, we’re twenty feet and more than a hundred years apart.
    *   *   *
    You went into labor not knowing my name, which I know now is unprecedented among our family: you knew Dad’s name before you laid eyes on him, the time and date of my birth, the hospital where he would drive you when you went into labor. But my name? My sex? Conspicuously absent in Uncle Dante’s gilt-edged book where all these happy details were recorded in advance.
    Dad told me later that you thought I’d be a stillbirth. He didn’t know about the record book, about the blank space where a name should go. But he told me that nothing he said while you were pregnant could convince you that I’d come into the world alive. You thought I’d slip out of you strangled and blue, already decaying.
    Instead, I started screaming before they pulled me all the way out.
    Dad said that even when the nurse placed me in your arms, you thought you were hallucinating. “I had to tell her, over and over: Miriam, you’re not dreaming, our daughter is alive.”
    I bit my lip when he told me that, locked the words “your son” out of sight. I regret that now; maybe I could have explained myself to him. I should have tried, at least.
    You didn’t name me for nearly a week.
    *   *   *
    Nineteen fifty-four tastes like Kellogg’s Rice Krispies in fresh milk, delivered earlier that morning. It smells like wood smoke, cedar chips, Dad’s Kamel cigarettes mixed with the perpetual smell of diesel in his clothes. It feels like the worn velvet nap of the couch in our living room, which I loved to run my fingers across.
    I was four years old. I woke up in the middle of the night after a loud crash of lightning. The branches of the oak tree outside my window were thrashing in the wind and the rain.
    I crept out of bed, dragging my blanket with me. I slipped out of the door and into the hallway, heading for your and Dad’s bedroom. I stopped