Free All about Skin by Jina Ortiz

hovering over me. I didn’t even tell him when I was going to do it. One blue stripe. Negative. I should have been relieved, relieved to have my lame life back, but the surprising thing was that I wasn’t. Then I did something I never thought I’d do, something unlike anything I’ve ever done before: it was really simple to get a blue marker, and take off the plastic cover and draw another little stripe across to form a blue “plus” sign. A plus , the test said, means you’re pregnant .
    When I got back home, I’d told him the test was positive, and flicked it into his lap. I told him that I didn’t know what I was going to do—what we were going to do. He paced in front of the crickets for a while. Then he tried to hide his shock and disappointment, then tried hiding his attempt to hide his shock and disappointment, then his attempt to hide his attempt to hide his shock and disappointment, and put his arm around me, hugged me with deep breaths, as if he’d finished a chapter in Stanislawski, and was method-acting condolences: how one musters up courage from deep within, how to enact compassion.
    â€œWhat’re we gonna do ?” I asked. I don’t know what I expected—whether I thought I’d catch him in a lie, or have him say something about not wanting the baby, or what—I forgot. All I knew was that something was pressing down on me, drowning me. If he’d said anything, anything at all, I would have been fine. If he’d started talking about the dialectic or about mesothelioma or aioli or how many types of cancer you could get from one little Newport menthol—I’d have been all right. Even if he’d cursed me out and blamed me and said he didn’t want the baby—I’d have understood.
    But he didn’t say anything. I saw everything he was thinking, though. I saw him thinking about his parents—Sy and Rita—growing worried in their condo’s sunny Sarasota kitchen; I saw him never finishing his thesis and going to work for some grubby nonprofit where everyone ate tofu and couldn’t wear leather and almost had a PhD; I saw him hauling the kid around to parks, saying it was the best thing he’d ever done. Really. The best .
    I walked out of that room, out of that house he rented with its really nice wood everywhere. I kept walking away, quickly at first, then so fast that the tears were the only thing to keep me from burning myself out like a comet. I wasn’t running from Gideon anymore, but even if he was following me, it was too late. Even with no baby, I could see there’d be no day when I’d meet Sy and Rita, no day when I’d quit Pita Delicious before they quit me, no day when I’d hang around a table of students talking about post-postfeminism, no day when Gideon and I would lock hands in front of the house we’d just bought. Anyone could have told him it was too late for that, for us, but Gideon was Gideon, and I could hear him calling after me, hoping the way he always did that the words would do the chasing for him.

Candidate
----
    Amina Gautier
    S he cannot know how it will all end, this weekend in Los Angeles for the annual convention. She cannot know that she will have talked herself out of a job and slept with a man with whom she will have no future (there is no connection between the job and the man). It is only the beginning of the conference—Thursday night—and she has just arrived in Los Angeles after changing planes in St. Louis to complete the trip. She has only just arrived and checked into a hotel within walking distance from both the convention headquarters and the Staples Center and she has just entered her spacious hotel room and deemed herself lucky that her department is willing to provide travel funds to grad students on the job market without requiring them to share accommodations.
    Behind her are two full beds covered in white duvets. Just beyond the