It started with tallying stretch marks, plotting out the food intake, graphing probability of freckles or chin dip. In the middle of dinner she would want it and he’d leave before seconds, drive to the local school to ask the janitor for discarded dittos with unanswered problems, and also, please, the keys. Because that is what you do. That is what you do when your Her is a human host and craves. You do that, because she is your Her.

As the months rolled on, she ate less, mathed more. She was an envelope, a paper carrier of the human form. Her skin too thin, he thought. She slipped herself between pages of formula, equation, and sign, perhaps to find out why. He thought that was the business of philosophy, but maybe philosophy is a brand of math. Pregnancy a science, parenting an art.

When primary school problems weren’t enough, he went to the library, checked out the books as quickly as she checked them off. Her list:

Critical Rationalism. Enumerative Combinatorics. Vector Calculus. Algebraic Topology. 

Matrix, dimension, and mass. The sets and slopes, the fractals, chaos, wavelets, tile.

And always braid. The way to get inside the mind is through the hair. At night he’d study the math of braid, the tender touch, divide the lock and fold. And after braid he’d look for more, into her eyes for more, hoping for addition, maybe sum. But look is not the way to get inside the mind.