Rebecca smoothes a crease from the entertainment section. A starlet is dead. A starlet is breastfeeding on the beach. Her mouth is open and her eyes are closed. Since she asked me to leave, moments come when I think there will be some final, significant word that passes between us, but there is nothing. I want to tell her that I have been painting. I have not made any headway in finding a job or a place to stay, but something is happening on my canvas, whatever soft, human calculus makes a thing alive, gives a painted eye roots and retina and makes it look like it can see. I stay up with a secondhand edition of Human Anatomy for Artists, and I start with the cranial bones and keep going until I make it to the teeth. Of course, it isn’t the same. I watch her drive off to work, and I think of the damp end of our shared cigarette, of the tiny morgue shower stall and her dainty feet below the curtain, of her bone saw, a discontinued edition designed specifically for a woman’s hand. I wake up from a dream where she is trying to put a lung into a jar that is too small, and all day everything smells pickled, though this is probably just the turpentine. I look at cheap studios in Newark and Bensonhurst, but I only have enough money for two months. I only have enough money for a month and an abortion, though on this I go back and forth. I feel unlike myself, spry and nocturnal and inclined to believe that this pregnancy is part of the reason my paintings are any good. Because I can’t sleep knowing what is happening inside my body, and when I don’t sleep, I paint. I have never been so tired. I have never been so prolific. What if I make the appointment and they ask if I’ve done it before? What if I am a woman who has to do this twice?

* * *

I go to my room and put on the iron bikini and secure the chain around my neck. I look at my stomach in the mirror and feel like there is something inside me already trying to make its way out. Though it is the size of a lentil, I feel a monstrous new level of abdominal antagonism that I cannot solve with ginger root. Rebecca comes into my room with Windex and newspaper. She is half in, half out of her costume, one eye heavily shadowed. Since she asked me to leave, Rebecca lets herself into my room more frequently. Never during the moments I’d like. Acrid, early-morning hours when I haven’t yet brushed my teeth. I leave my paintings out, hoping she will see, but she doesn’t say anything. Now she comes into the bathroom and begins to clean the mirror. She is careful not to meet my eyes.

* * *

I think I could have this baby out of spite. My parents made me on purpose and look what happened. Spite is more sustainable. It gives you something to prove, and what better way to prove yourself than through a child, my personal failure amended by such heroic child-rearing that my kid recognizes patterns even before his skull has fused. A genius child born out of a functional grudge who will accompany me to Eric’s funeral, where Rebecca will be shriveled and veiled. When I begin to braid my hair, she watches me, and I try to remain aloof, but I am a little preoccupied with the memory of my first abortion, which I don’t think about regularly and occasionally even forget until I open Twitter and have a run-in with a Young Republican. I was sixteen. I could not have been a mother. The women in my family maybe should not have been mothers. This is not so much a judgment as a fact. They were dying inside their own bodies, and now all these dead components are my inheritance.

* * *

When the neighbors have all returned to their houses and one of the officers has finally pried the doghouse from the old woman’s arms, Akila comes into my room with a hot comb and lets down her hair, which in a month has grown thick and kinky. She is already in her Starfleet uniform, which we purchased from the Party Supply store at the eleventh hour, and which she is not particularly happy about, though as I turn on the stove and put the hot comb to the flame, Akila summons Uhura, practices words in Tamarian, Ferengi, and, of course, Klingon. Over the last couple of months, we have updated her hair care through careful trial and error, even as we were routinely waylaid by suburban convenience stores stocked exclusively with Caucasian shampoos. Once, in Hoboken, we discovered a single bottom shelf with old pomade and congealed Cantu. There were a few trips to Brooklyn, one for oils and one for butters, the homemade and saran-wrapped, the saditty and petroleum-free, Akila’s sopping twist-outs transformed by a half percentage point of fall humidity until we forwent the apple cider vinegar and just cracked a few eggs over her head. Now we have a routine: coconut oil, manuka honey, and two firm Bantu knots before bed. As I go through her hair with the hot comb, I imagine its future iterations—the five-dollar ponies and mangled yaki and rainbow Kanekalon and the certainty of a post-breakup big chop, and I wonder where inside this spectrum she will ultimately land. As we are finishing up, Eric comes down the stairs and comments on the smell, but when he sees the source, he seems to gather that it is Something Black, and he is contrite.

* * *

He is already in costume, and out of all of us, his physique is closest to the material, a supple inverted triangle that is practically canon, though he has gone for the updated costume, the muted ballistic nylon instead of shiny spandex, which feels less patriotic, but along with his whole working-father vibe is maybe the Captain America you get when the country has, relative to the rest of the world, entered its surly teenage years. As he prepares a cup of tea, I imagine our child, Eric’s bone structure, my dysfunctional bowels. I have no doubt that a boy would be beautiful. A girl might have some things to overcome. When Akila is gone, he pours some whiskey into his tea and tries to secure the last component of his costume, a harness he is too drunk to put on. I offer to help and he waves me away, but after a while he gives up and sags into a chair.

* * *

He has been this way since his trip to the ER: squirrelly, prone to random displays of machismo, less discreet about how much he drinks. When we met, his drinking always felt situational, a thing he did because we were out. It felt like a necessary preamble, routine, like putting on a sock before a shoe. I should have noticed sooner that some things should not be routine. Looking at him now, it feels impossible that I ever could have missed it. I think about our child again, and this time a slew of predispositions undermine that gorgeous Punnett square. A child with profound narcotic inclinations, with generations of inherited trauma, with questionable brain chemistry and a lifetime of some ceaseless prefrontal seesaw, with my flat, rectangular feet and our mutual taste for disco, which in the year 2045 is likely to be even less cool, Eric’s giant umlaut genes meaning nothing if our child grows up in America and drowns in his or her allotted levels of racism-induced cortisol as the earth’s sun slowly dies. The only reason I want to tell him is because of the improbability of it, this miraculous fluke that has come about even through the severe limitations of our bodies, a fluke that makes me ill but also dreamy, like something can be different, new. It is not so bad to be an incubator. Everything I eat and drink feels like it amounts to something. Oysters, chocolate, mangos drenched in chili oil, all for a purpose and all excused, an education for the palate I am building with the most acute iterations of sugar and salt. But conversely, it is terrible being an incubator. Everything I do feels like it should amount to something.

* * *

As I am getting the harness over Eric’s head, Rebecca comes down the stairs in her costume, and like Eric, she has chosen the updated version, fishnets and coochie cutters instead of the jester’s romper, though she has stuck with the mallet instead of the baseball bat. Originally, it was meant to be a couple’s costume, but when Eric put on the clown makeup, for a night, no one in the house could sleep. Either way, Rebecca’s Harley Quinn is so primary, so sullen, it looks best without a counterpart, which is to say that this cosplay does not really suit her, and no cosplay in which she is supposed to be sidekick would. She puts the mallet down on the island, takes a sip of Eric’s tea, and wrinkles her nose. However, she says nothing. She opens the window and sprays pink dye onto the ends of her pigtails.

* * *