“Maus, you’re bleeding.”

She had rolled onto her back, pulling her thighs upward. She was breathing very quickly, her face drenched with sweat. “Hold. My legs,” she gasped.

“Hold them how?”

“I’m going. To push. Theo.”

He positioned himself at the foot of the bed and placed his hands against her knees. As the next contraction came, she bent at the waist, driving her weight toward him.

“Oh, God. I can see him.”

She had opened like a flower, revealing a disk of pink skin covered in wet black hair. Then, in the next instant, this vision was gone, the flower’s petals folding over it, drawing the baby back inside her.

Three, four, five more times she bore down; each time the baby appeared and, just as quickly, vanished. For the first time he thought it: this baby doesn’t want to be born. This baby wants to stay just where it is.

“Help me, Theo,” she begged. All her strength was gone. “Pull him out, pull him out, please, just pull him out.”

“You have to push one more time, Maus.” She seemed completely helpless, insensate, on the verge of final collapse. “Are you listening? You have to push!”

“I can’t, I can’t!”

The next contraction took her; she lifted her head and released an animal cry of pain.

“Push, Maus, push!”

She did; she pushed. As the top of the baby’s head appeared, Theo reached down and slipped his index finger inside her, into her heat and dampness. He felt the orbital curve of an eye socket, the delicate bulge of a nose. He couldn’t pull the baby, there was nothing to hold on to, the baby would have to come to him. He drew back and positioned a hand beneath her, leaning his shoulder against her legs to brace the force of her effort.

“We’re almost there! Don’t stop!”

Then, as if the touch of his hand had given it the will to be born, the baby’s face appeared, sliding from her. A vision of magnificent strangeness, with ears and a nose and a mouth and bulging, froglike eyes. Theo cupped his hand below the smooth, wet curve of its skull. The cord, a translucent, blood-filled tube, was looped around its neck. Though no one had told him to do this, Theo placed a finger under it, gently lifting it away. Then he reached inside Mausami and tucked a finger under the baby’s arm, and pulled.