She felt movement between her legs and heard a strange sound, the mewling of an ocelot, perhaps, awful. It was a monster, they had bred a monster inside her, she’d known it, and now here it was.

Another wave came, growing and growing until it completely enveloped her, becoming something beyond pain and outside of life altogether, a storm from another reality, a wave made of blood, a rain of tears.

Through the agony, there came silence. Someone was screaming, but in the distance, somewhere along the tattered edges of the world.

She listened to the screaming and imagined gulls out on the bay, wheeling in the sun, their voices echoing with fatality and the vastness of the sea.

At first, it had all seemed so excellent. She’d been able to pay her rent, get a few nice things, eat regularly. She’d wanted to tell her mom, except she had no mom to tell. She still hadn’t got her mind wrapped around that. Moms don’t die like that, at age forty-five. Moms get old and get white hair and rock in rocking chairs.

Oh, who cared about that, her mind was wandering, she was in trouble here, she wasn’t able to tell them how much … or maybe she had told them and they didn’t care.

Turner’s face was like a moon hanging in a winter sky. Lonely night sky, sky of loss. He went off across the room with Sarge, and they talked together, arguing. Sarge’s face was practically purple, Turner’s like gray, dead smoke.

She wanted to cry out, she wanted to tell them again, but it was just too hard to talk now. Her eyes closed, she did not close them. She felt as if her skeleton were sinking out of her skin, sinking into the echoing underground halls beneath this place.

Oh, remember the trees on summer nights, waving in the moonlight? Remember taps being played at the base at eleven, echoing across the silence of the town? Life in deep America, profound ordinary life.

Her great regret was never to have known love. No boy had ever pined for her, sung to her. He had talked, Dr. Turner, about her pregnancy as if it were something to do with a machine. He’d described it as “an insertion.” He had told her that she wouldn’t feel any pain, and that was true, not when he slid the plastic syringe in that had the semen in it. Whose was it? Classified. She had not asked if it was human, hadn’t dared to, because if he’d said no, she would have headed straight to the nearest abortion clinic, and his money be damned.

On that first day, she’d walked out of this place with twenty fifty-dollar bills in her purse, and the first thing she’d done was to go to a diner and get the rib eye.