Buying a Pregnancy Test in October or Schrodinger’s Fetus

I need to buy a pregnancy test today. But first I’m getting my nails done. A deep burgundy to match my new eel skin purse, which as I walk becomes speckled black with rain. At the nail salon I sling my mother’s coat over the back of the chair and contemplate the tremendous difference between Winter Wine and Scarlet Dreams. 

I haven’t been feeling all that different but I can’t remember when I last bled. And I have been restless, melancholic, short, but perhaps that’s the rain. A month ago a man pointed at my belly and asked, Do you have a baby? Do you have a baby in there? and then just yesterday a crow swooped down on me, it’s talons grazing my hair and everything. I pocket such things, file them in a library of omens and symbols which, when strung together correctly, could convince me of anything. And here I go, thinking that the part of god that is all crows and strange men and rain is trying to speak to me. So it’s worth checking. It’s better to be safe. I choose Scarlet Dreams. 

There’s a woman beside me who searches for a nail shade that will match her bright orange headband. She says it was her mother’s, then begins to complain to the nail lady about her shop. We’re always busy but we’re not making any money. I just had to give a lady $40 back because she couldn’t figure out how to use a mop. I don’t even do refunds. Exchange only. But I had to make an exception because she’s psycho. I’m sure you have ladies that are never happy with their nails either and they come in to have the smallest things fixed. Will they ever be happy? I don’t think so. My cousin Rebecca is like that. Never happy. Won’t give me any space. I think she’s obsessed with me. I had to call her husband and say take care of your wife. She wants too much of my time.

We sit with my secret, listening. The two of us, me and my not-baby. My womb is both empty and full, swimming in a limbo of reluctant godhood. And while the red lacquer bakes under the warm blue light I think about the poem I’m going to write. Or rather, I think about how there are two poems, and I don’t know which I will write until I piss on a stick.

The woman beside me is still talking about Rebecca. Maybe having a baby would fix her depression. Maybe it would fix mine. I want a baby. Or, well, I want to be a mother. I think I’d be a good mother if I had the time. I’m always working. But you’re always working too, I guess. Do your kids ever say, Mommy you work too much?

But does it really matter, to the poem, whether or not I am pregnant? I suppose not. What matters is what I will say to the clinic when I call to ask for an abortion. I need a script, not a poem, polite, concise, appropriately ashamed. I rehearse it in my head while the nail lady does the second coat. She says she likes me because I sit still and I’m not picky. This makes me happy because I can imagine this means I would also be good at having an abortion. And the last thing I want is to be a bother to anyone. The woman leans over to me and says, I love that color. Perfect for fall, for Halloween. Blood red. 

I tip generously. I enter the rain. I go to the drugstore on fourth and vine. I buy toilet paper, a silver-foil slab of rich chocolate, and a $15 arbiter of fate, slim and pink. The cashier scans it mechanically. Maybe he’s imagining what I’ll look like with a belly or, crueler, what I looked like conceiving it. Or maybe he doesn’t notice whether it’s a pregnancy test, gum, lipstick, or laxatives. He calculates my total and I, the month my not-baby would be born. May or June. Hopefully May like my mother. Oh how rich are the lives women imagine we live! Just now, I am walking home with my nails, freshly red and dewy with rain, and I’m clutching to my chest the precious package of twelve toilet rolls, and, for not much longer, there both is and is not a life inside my lush body, that I will and will not kill, dreaming in scarlet. The only color I can imagine it knows.