Raspberry
Three days after the last time they have sex, she goes off birth control. It's like she knows she won't need it for a while.
“It’s weird,” she says to a group of workmates eight weeks later. “Usually when I stop, I get my period within a few days. This time, nothing.” A filmic silence sweeps over the table while they wait for her to figure it out. "Oh hon," one of them eventually says. "Oh shit."
Four hours later she sits in a restaurant bathroom unwrapping a pharmacy package with an unsteady hand. Functionally it is a unisex bathroom, fully self-contained, but the sign on the door says Men. The other identical bathroom, occupied when she arrived, says Women. She imagines the signs hanging together in a clear plastic packet in Mitre 10, a couple of dollars cheaper than two separate “Toilet” signs.
She's told herself repeatedly during the afternoon that the nausea she's been having in the mornings lately is from fasting – it is mild, it always goes away when she eats something. Her boobs are tender from running trails in inadequate crop tops. Maybe that's a period cramp she's feeling now? Is everything fine?
Nothing is fine.
When she was a kid she remembers asking her mum why we say fall pregnant the way we say fall sick. “It’s a figure of speech,” her mum said, not wanting her to know yet that by becoming pregnant some women fall from grace, become fallen women. Make themselves into huge and unwelcome reminders of the ur-Fall, of Man’s first disobedience and the Fruit (blessed be the Fruit).
Fruit's always the comparator, isn't it, she thinks now. She googles it. "At eight weeks pregnant, your baby is the size of a raspberry." Your baby.
She pees on the stick and puts it on the floor on a paper towel, out of sight between her feet. The package prominently advertises Results in One Minute, and she supposes for some women every second of waiting is torture. She would sit here forever if she could, keeping silent vigil with Shrödinger’s Pregnancy Test. She feels like there's no good outcome anymore. If this baby, this possible baby, is real, she knows that she will want it, and that he will not.
She counts to 100. She thinks about falling sick, and falling pregnant, and falling in love, and falling for a line, and falling victim, and falling apart. Her heart aches helplessly. She counts to 100 again.
When she looks down, it is at an exculpatory blank window. Is it relief that makes her cry so hard?
She leaves the stick, hygienically re-wrapped, in the large open bin in the Men’s bathroom. For the satisfaction of being confusing, she puts the box in there too, nestling it prominently among the crumpled paper like an item in a gift basket. An artistic statement, a small compensation for what she will not now be creating.