OCTOBER'S SON
Will Kaufman

 

When my wife began to swell I wondered what seed infected her womb, my own having long proved fruitless. As she grew, her cravings turned to dirt and water and long spells naked in the yard under the bare trees and what sun pierced the clouds, and I asked her, Who have you loved? Who have you fucked? Why is your belly growing round?

She told me she had only loved me, had only fucked me, and if she was fucking pregnant then I was not the one owed an explanation.

I threw her precious record player out the window, scattered gears and belts across our lawn, and she shed her clothes and went to lie in the yard, walking over the sharp wreckage. After an hour I went outside with a bag and collected all the belts and gears, including one I picked off the sole of her foot, where it had stuck. I bent to the ground over and over, a clucking hen pecking for poor food among the grass, and she lay down on the chill concrete, smiling when sunlight shafted over her body despite her goose bumps, her stiff nipples.

 

 

My wife expanded with remarkable haste, growing so like a pumpkin that I joked she must have fucked a pumpkin and she asked if I would like to feel the baby kick. I put my hand on her stomach and realized it was the first time we had touched in days. I felt no movement, only her taught skin and my own partial erection.

I asked if she wanted to go to Lamaze class, she told me she damn well knew how to breathe.