“What the hell’s all this racket in—?” Dad stood in the doorway, his eyes wide and furious, his jaw working as if words were still coming out of his mouth.

Mom turned toward him and said, “You just get on back to your paper, leave us alone,” then reached over and grabbed the edge of the door and began to close it in his face but Dad was having none of it; he bent his arm and slammed his elbow against the door, knocking it open again, then stormed into the bathroom, yelling, “You don’t tell me what to do in my own house, woman! I’ll not have—” And then the rest of it withered on his tongue and he fell silent.

Lucy pulled away from her mother, wiped the sweat and tears from her own face, leaving streaks of blood in their place, and saw that her father was staring into the toilet.

“Oh my dear Lord,” he said.

Lucy moved forward to look but then Mom was there in front of her, saying, “Don’t, hon, you don’t—”

Lucy pushed her out of the way and leaned over, her hands gripping the edge of the toilet bowl.

And there was her baby; small, like a bumblebee, like something you could balance on the tip of your thumb, Tom Thumb, that was its name, floating around in the center of the blood and urine and placenta and what remained of the amniotic sac, wriggling around as the force of its mother’s beating heart against the porcelain created ripples in the water, little swirls, and as she stared Lucy could make out things, little things, microscopic Tom-Thumb-things like fin-flaps that would have been arms, knobs that might have been its hands, a bump that could have turned into a more flattering version of her own nose as Tom Thumb grew older, a dark pinprick of eye, all of it curving into a semi-human shape my child, my baby, swim to shore, swim like a good strong little boy, over here, I’m right over here—

—the lid slammed down on her fingers and she cried out, falling backwards and yanking her hands free.

“I told you,” said her father, his breath coming out in angry, wheezing bursts. “I told you God would punish you for your shameful behavior.”

“Stop that right now,” said Mom.

“A common whore, that’s what you was, and now look what you went and did! Poor little child never had a chance—you killed it, you know that, don’t you? Killed it just as sure as if you’d gone to one of them murderin’ sons-of-bitches call themselves doctors and had it cut out of you.”

Mom was getting to her feet now. “Get out of here. Do it now.”

“I told you once, don’t be—” he reached for the handle “—ordering me around in my own house.”

Mom’s hand like a stone from a slingshot struck his wrist. “You can’t flush it. She’ll have to...to take it to the hospital so they can test it and see what went wrong.”