Over the next week I found myself in stolen moments standing sideways in my dresser mirror, pooching out my stomach wide as it would go, wondering what I would look like if I changed my mind and let it grow. Would I get fatter, and would my nose get wider? Neither scenario seemed possible to me then. As far as I knew, I was less than two months pregnant, but it felt like the baby was already born. My heart was beating for someone besides myself. I imagined myself with a child curled up inside of me: warm, snug, probably asleep. I wondered if it would be able to feel itself being ripped and bled out of me. If, before it figured out what was happening, it would pass all the nightmares it had planned on dreaming onto me. If I would be haunted until I died with something questioning me about why I didn’t want it to live. Reproduction … genetics … cycles … life. All of that shit I had learned in school started tugging at my brain. But the tug felt good, opened my mind and my eyes up. Made me think of how I had gotten here and how Ma and Aunt Jewel had gotten here, and even Grandma. And how we all were different but still so similar: the same kinds of coils in our hair, the same shared history on the South Side, the same lazy ways of cutting off the ends of words like store and drawer. And that’s when I knew that I had generations of spirits and souls and lives sitting inside of me, waiting to take shape and show themselves to the world again, through me.