Then my wife screamed, she hollered and beat whatever was in reach: tables, chairs, cabinets, doors, me. I said that we should go to the hospital. No, she said, no hospital, dirt. She stumbled into the yard, trying to hold her belly and the walls at the same time, leaving a trail of mucous and blood on the floor.

She squatted down on the lawn, digging with her fingernails while she grimaced and groaned. I told her not to fuck up the grass, it took me months to get that shit green and lush, and she screamed that she was squeezing a fucking pumpkin through her vagina and best she knew it was my fucking pumpkin and could I shut the fuck up.

I don’t know. I got down on my knees and held her hand, and I was sweating all over, maybe even more than she was, and there were sounds and smells I was unprepared for. I said we should have gone to Lamaze and she told me to get some scissors for the umbilical cord.

By the time I came back outside my wife was limp on the ground, blood and shit streaked down her thighs and a bright orange pumpkin slick with afterbirth between her legs. The pumpkin stem was part and parcel of a woody vine that led into her torn sex. She told me to cut the umbilical, but the scissors were meant for paper, not the tough cellulose of a pumpkin stem. I hacked at it while my wife faded and wilted and paled.

Yes, we had used that word, both said pumpkin, formed the shape with our mouths, but to see the thing come true shook me. Had my wife known all along, or was she just as lost as me?

Finally I cut the pumpkin free and I picked up my wife and carried her, with the stem that hung from her slapping against my knees, to the car. The blood that poured from her had become a rich red, and something was wrong.

I returned from the hospital, alone, to find the pumpkin sitting where I had left it on the lawn, the last of my wife’s living blood dried in its ridges and caked in its dents. It was not a well-shaped pumpkin, but flat on one side. I kicked at it, and it rolled a short distance, and what hollow anger I felt turned to shame. This was, after all, the fruit of my wife’s body, a body I had loved and held.