“Talking to Tad loves you!” Beth said. “This is huge. Dad will be excited. I’m going to link to your poem on Facebook, okay?”

Janine didn’t answer. She was thinking about the argument that had started during the webinar, and the starkness of her own poem, alone on the Ranch’s website. There had not been any other work. Had the other students objected? And what about the personhood debate? Janine was pro-life, but Patty Connor, one of the memoirists—a minister’s wife—had posted that she opposed the amendment for medical reasons. If the amendment passed, according to Patty, she might not be able to have children.

“Mom?” Beth said. “Is that okay?”

“Okay,” Janine said weakly. “I guess it’s okay.”

Her family toasted her with their iced tea glasses at dinner. “To Mom,” said Beth. “For standing up for her school.”

“And standing up for life,” Christine added.

“I’m proud of you, honey,” said Rick. “I heard some talk about it on the radio, even.”

“On the radio?” Janine asked.

“It’s a whole movement, trying to get people to sign up for classes. They’re calling it a Day of Inspiration.”

Janine was incredulous. “But my class is full. There’s no room—”

“One-day classes, I think they said. Or internet classes? I heard it on the radio.”

“It’s all over Facebook, too,” said Christine. “You’re going viral.”

“Going viral,” Janine repeated. She knew what it meant, but the phrase sounded unpleasant, like a tropical disease. She felt a little ill, in fact—tired and achy, her eyes stinging with exhaustion. Janine had spent the afternoon reading links that Patty Connor posted about embryonic personhood, an idea that went way back to the very day of conception to establish the beginning of life. She’d looked at microscopic images of eight- and sixteen-celled embryos and watched a film of the beautiful, translucent cells dividing and dividing. It was amazing to think that every life began that way, that Beth and Christine, even Janine and Rick, had once been tiny clusters of cells, floating unsuspected or hoped-for inside their mothers. The embryo on her screen was certainly alive, but it reminded her of a flower or a blackberry more than a baby—something singular and unique, but also mysterious and fragile. She wasn’t sure how she felt, politically, about the rights of zygotes (especially considering poor Patty Connor), but she’d written a poem, her first in weeks, and had wept with relief when it was done.

“What if I went with her?” Beth was saying now. “There’s a tropical storm forming, and if it develops, it has a possibility of landfall between Naples and Tampa. If nothing else, I could get some footage of the controversy. It would be a great opportunity.”