If you are my wife, I texted, what advice did you give to women who were desperate to become pregnant?

When I first got pregnant, she texted back, I thought I was turning into a werewolf.

Do you think werewolves get premenstrual syndrome but for becoming a werewolf in addition to regular premenstrual syndrome?

I think female werewolves go into heat. They don’t have periods. So they don’t experience premenstrual syndrome. But the general werewolf population gets premenstrual syndrome for changing into a werewolf and that’s why werewolves are a matriarchal society.

Maybe you are my wife.

You are not my husband.

The deceased with a grand piano in perfect tune and without a trace of dust was easy—concert pianist, I concluded. But he didn’t fulfill his dream of playing Carnegie Hall, therefore he returns as a ghost night after night to practice his Rachmaninoff. I was so lazy, unlike that pianist ghost I invented. My wife could be a harsh ghost critic. Where was my imagination? Clearly, this owner had been devoured by the piano. Look at it, she insisted, doesn’t it look hungry? Speaking of imagination, I said, you always go for the meals!

Tinkly piano music kept coming from a place that was and wasn’t the piano. My wife and I started to fear the piano truly was possessed, but then the niece of the deceased informed us that there was a school for gifted children down the street. Sometimes we forgot there were children in Sarasota County, despite trying to have our own. We strolled to the school for gifted children, and outside there were boys fishing in a construction hole, though we didn’t know if they were gifted boys. Gators sunned themselves in the hole, and my wife told me it was a shame the gators weren’t wearing those yellow construction hats. But alligators are so tough already, I argued, they’re like a big construction hat.

The youngest boy caught a fish that resembled garbage. Unfortunately, after the fish had swallowed the hook, the pointy end punctured through its eye. This made the boy sad, so an older, freckled boy muscled the fish from him, yanked out the hook, and punctured it through the fish’s other eye. Pliny the Elder attested in his Natural History that ghosts despise people with freckles, so I whispered to my wife, “Pliny the Elder.” She demanded the freckled kid hand over the fish, and she tossed it into the water after removing the hook. My wife was always performing small kindnesses, such as saving fish. As we left, I tried to make her feel better by saying, “We will never have a son who is a bully.” And she replied, “I don’t care if he’s a murderer.”

According to the Saxons, the woman who routinely miscarries may be visited by the ghosts of the children she has lost. In the Lacnunga, a book of their folk remedies, a charm is suggested: Let the woman who cannot nourish her child take part of her own child’s grave, wrap it in black wool, and trade it to merchants, then say, “I sell it, you buy it, this black wool and this seed of grief.” The child’s grave is the miscarried child.