I WAIT FOR THE WORLD TO CHANGE around me. I search for a hole where a new life could begin. I look for clues on the sidewalk, in the patterns of the clouds, in the trash cans of the neighbors, in a pile of my hair swept from the floor.

I look for signs: Coins on heads up, four-leaf clovers, rabbit feet, a symbol.

I type the notes. Once home, I cook the chicken. I sleep. I save the coins.

Knotless, my life carries on. The days flick by and nothing changes. It is an endless loop of the same movie, the same woman in motion, over and over and over again and is this a life?

THE NEXT NEW MOON, I DO NOT BLEED.

I GAG LOUDLY, VOMIT IN THE BATHROOM, spirals of bile yellowing the water.

Each night, I pray it isn’t true. But I know it in my blood which pounds: Mother, mother, mother.

Weeks pass, my belly growing bigger and bigger, a shape different than the gone knot.

“I have made a new knot,” I whisper to myself, a hand on the small hard bulge of my abdomen. The scars from the surgery spiral around the new shape. It is as if I have warped my own history again.

◆During pregnancy, a woman’s heart gets longer and wider so her ventricles can pump extra blood for the child

◆In order to prepare for birth, the body produces a hormone that softens the ligaments so the baby can pass through the pelvis during labor

◆During pregnancy, the uterus will stretch from the size of a pear to that of a watermelon

◆Babies cry before they are born

SOON, I PICTURE IT CONSTANTLY: Me with the child, out in the sunshine. The child reverberates in my bone marrow, a new life emerging from the old.

I close my eyes and try to sense her. I try to make the shape of her out: Her torso, her core.

The same scene plays on repeat: The knotted girl bursting through me, splitting me open like my mother and her mother before her.

THE BOSS PEERS DOWN AT MY BELLY.

“You’re sure you’re not expecting?” he asks. “Just hitting the donuts a little hard maybe?”

I hunch over my belly to make it look smaller.

“Not expecting anything,” I say.

I wait until the bathroom is empty before I retch into the toilet.

In the break room, Brenda looks at my green soup.

“Maybe you want to try a diet or something,” she says.

“Not a bad idea,” I mutter.

I imagine my hands around her throat.

“I know a guy who can sell you a nice juice cleanse.”

I imagine my hands clenching.

I WAKE WET. I SHAKE OFF THE DREAM and sit up in a strange new warmth. Beneath the white blanket, my legs are soaked with blood. The mattress is soaked, slick.