pregnancy cards

2022-03-16

I crossed the border of the kingdom into the wilderness and sure enough, I immediately got pregnant.

I know one thing for sure, and that is that I do not want to be pregnant, so I start flying over the countryside flinging playing cards of pregnancy from a deck in my hands, kind of sowing them into the ground and distributing my pregnancy all over and making the ground fertile.

At dinner that night, I ate quietly with the queen, just knowing that she somehow knew even though I was really careful to make sure that there’s no way she could know.

“So,” she starts. My hands freeze while trying to spear a piece of broccoli and I stare at my plate. “You left the castle grounds today?”

“Ugh, I knew it!” I cry. “How do you even know that? Are you spying on me? Why can’t you just leave me alone! Geez!”

And I storm off.

Later I’m in the classroom and when the class ends, the teacher comes up to me and starts to scold me for leaving to go to the bathroom without asking permission. I tell her that I am not in the practice of asking for permission to perform bodily functions.

The other students are filing out of the classroom, and some of the feral kindergartners gleefully climb up the walls and remove the ceiling panels and wave goodbye and giggle, and crawl up into the ductwork to go wherever it is they go between classes.

Then I’m swimming down in the tide pools. There’s a huge tank of exotic sea creatures in the middle of the bay, its walls flush with the surface of the water. And when the water levels rise, the creatures swim out, or you can swim in, and you can all swim around together, which is really fun. But the orcas are kind of big and scary up close. So I swim next to them for a while, but then get scared and swim ahead around the tank, and then swim back closer again, darting in and out as I feel brave and scared and brave and scared.