And the swamp is never quiet either, not really. It is filled with a constant song of many voices, the voices of the birds and the trees and the insects and the wind culminating in a sighing, humming, buzzing, trilling soundscape, a music of the earth. Perhaps I can appreciate a certain kind of quiet, but when the swamp goes silent, that’s when I feel the most uneasy, as if someone is turning down the volume of the world.

Somehow the quiet is calming. Somehow the quiet is frightening.

I do not know why I am going on about this. Sight and sound.

Yes. I do know.

“There he is.”

A distinct gray shape appears from the pixelated darkness. There in the pulsing womb we see Julian’s emergent form appear as if sound made visible, like a spectral voice coming through radio static. His nascent self, almost complete.

I know we are not really seeing him. We are seeing the echoes of him, hearing with our eyes, and I wonder what my father would have thought of that, what he thought when he saw the ultrasounds of his own daughters before they were born. How it felt to him to hear with his eyes. Julian is still hidden, though. We cannot see him secreted away in Elizabeth’s womb, but we can hear his edges, his form, his shape.

Elizabeth cannot contain the smile that she shares with the monitor and then turns to me, to which I must respond in kind although I cannot shake the sick feeling that has come over me at the sight of him, making him real. I see him in that ashen gradient of the machine, not quite human, and I think of the boy dragging the knife down my door, calling me Auntie, marking me.

“Look at him,” says Elizabeth. “Just look at him.”

The ultrasound technician points out his body parts like it’s a scavenger hunt: a hand, a foot, a knee.

“He’s perfect,” says Elizabeth. “Isn’t he perfect?”

The lights are too bright and I feel a headache building behind my eyes.

“I’ll meet you out there,” I say, and move blindly from the room while Elizabeth calls after me to see what’s the matter. She will be angry that she cannot continue to share this moment with me, for sharing moments, to her, is much more agreeable than experiencing them on her own. If she has a moment all to herself, she must wonder, what is the point?

I emerge into a long corridor and make my way toward the lobby. That sick feeling hasn’t left me, carries my feet down the tiled floor, past multitudes of closed doors behind which anything might be happening. Behind those doors lie rooms where a woman is finding out her baby’s sex, where another might be doubled over with terrible cramps, where someone is getting the worst sort of news. Rooms imbued with the mystery of birth and death. Whatever lives in those rooms remains a secret to me, hidden behind their many doors.