Do you have kids?
No, but I drove across the country and followed handmade signs to FRY BREAD near Albuquerque. I camped alone, and in the pitch-dark cold midnight, something panted big and wet outside my tent.
Do you have kids?
No, I have a PhD, and a grudge against a Nobel laureate who can be found making Cup Noodles in the kitchen down the hall most days. I have the yellow, water-stained envelope of a parking ticket on the floor of my car. For the last decade, I’ve kept a log of books I’ve read, and I’ve stained wooden cases to hold them.
Do you have kids?
No, but when I was 18, my young lover and I loved each other like mother and father, like we were each parent and we were each child. It was the first time I belonged to someone. We were naked all the time and we were always in bed and we were always touching. In his mother’s house, in his twin bed, we would daydream about having a baby there with us, between us, someone to hold the overflow of all that sweet.
Do you have kids?
No, but when I was 23, I had a lover whose father had beaten him so hard and so often he had no skin left. No one ever loved anyone like I loved this raw red nerve, this flesh that couldn’t be touched without pain, this Moses-in-a-basket, this living-dead, this grown man I wanted to feed from my breast, this beast who took what he learned from his father and taught me.
Do you have kids?
No, but I loved that beast, that beauty, the wrong way. I loved him like a woman loves a man, but also the wrong way. I held him in my hands and knew his life and death were in my fingers. I loved all 52 of him fanned in front of me, a half-moon of selves on a folding table: the bawling baby, the child approaching his sleeping father with a knife, the wooly mammoth drunk in jail, the scholar in his section 8 apartment, cigarette in hand. I know what it is to love someone like your heart walking around outside your body and the rest of your body lurching after it with fear. I don’t need to do it again.
Do you have kids?
No, but when I can’t sleep, sometimes I think about the body of my cat in liquid motion: tense and spring, soft, small feathers snowed on the pavement.
Do you have kids?
No. Do you have sex?
Do you have kids?
No, but the women I know talk to me about blood and Tampax and invite me to their menstruation healing circles, which I politely decline. I have had a couple close encounters, though. One: I made love to a girl who loved only Jesus before and after me, and my fingers inside her brushed against something rubber and inadvertently moved it out of place. In the morning, there was blood under my nails. Two: I was in a shared bathroom and there was a spot of rust, of brown, shining up from the wooden floor next to the bathmat. Like a dog in heat, I thought, and rubbed the spot with the ball of my bare foot, grinding it into the floorboard like I was putting out a cigarette.
Do you have kids?
No, but when I was younger, I always bought pregnancy tests for my shy friends. How many gallons of water have I watched waste down the drain to cover the embarrassed sounds in a stall? How many nervous hands have crushed mine waiting for a pink fate to form on a stick?
Do you have kids?
No, I have lovers and friends. I have clean, worn linen and art and a couple tabs of acid. This year, I bought season tickets. I have pen and paper. I have pots and pans. I have quiet mornings: I watch the sun coming up from behind the Burmese restaurant. I have its warm, gold light on my hands.
—
Hope is a geneticist and science writer in Berkeley, California. Her writing has recently been published in venues such as Jellyfish Review, The Hunger, and Lost Balloon, and is forthcoming at The Rumpus. You can find her at hoperhenderson.com, and on twitter @hoperhenderson.
Artwork by: Diana Baltag
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