Boy by Lucy Zhang

When the NIPT results came back saying  boy, I sang to the heavens and burned money made from joss paper. The flames singed my ring finger, leaving a blister that bubbled for days before finally popping like a water balloon, unleashing with it the fluids that, in an alternate reality, might’ve been the excess residue of a girl—snot, amniotic goop, and all. A boy who, like a sturdy mule, will carry husband’s last name across mountain peaks and ocean waves with my last name haunting his genetic profile. A boy who, according to father-in-law’s world lens, is really the only fathomable outcome from his hardy bloodline, built on the hunched backs of men culling cornstalks and sowing kaoliang and smoking cigarettes. What the women did, I never knew because I never saw them. They’d vanished so deep into the house that I thought the men had been spirited onto earth instead of fertilized and formed through meteoric cell division. I did not want a girl who’d divide and divide and squeeze my organs to foreign corners of my torso only for her to disappear into the ether the moment she crowned. The boy would simply materialize without consequence, a perfectly executed job with a perfectly tangible outcome at my fingertips. That he continued to kick and bulge from within me must’ve meant fate intended him to be too heavy for me to carry.

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LUCY ZHANG — Lucy writes, codes, and watches anime. Her work has appeared in Virginia Quarterly Review, Shenandoah, The Massachusetts Review, and elsewhere. Find her at https://lucyzhang.tech.

Art by LAUREN McGOVERN — Lauren lives, creates, and teaches in the Adirondacks of northern New York State. She is a big fan of rocks, moss, and wildflowers. Her essays and artwork have appeared in WOW! Women on Writing, The Sunlight Press, What’s Your Grief, The Razor, Gordon Square Review, MUTHA Magazine, and elsewhere. Visit laurenmcgovern.online.