God and Jetfire Read Online Free

another whole person to contain it all? It should at least require collaborative skill, but I could barely design a building; how could we have inadvertently concocted a child ?
    But if I really was pregnant, then maybe it meant something. I’d taken smaller things as signs. Once when Jevn drove me to the doctor for a sore throat, the prescription was mistakenly written out to me with his last name. It had seemed like an artifact from the future, evidence from beyond that we were meant to be. I put that orange pill bottle in a drawer where I stored things I meant to keep forever, like my cat’s tooth, and my own tooth, and a turquoise cross given to me by my grandmother. And the pieces of those ugly vases.
    But, no. I was an accident. And being born and giving birth stitch a person into a history, puncture the fabric of the universe, anchor heels and hands firmly in the earth. They make a person part of a lineage, and lines, as I learned in trigonometry, have direction and intent. They don’t float like points, without mass or orientation; they split the sky, they distinguish here from there, they begin to tell a story. I couldn’t be pregnant because that would mean I had to be here, a stitch in the seam, connecting everyone.
    *   *   *
    In the morning my sister wrote she would come back from China and help me raise the baby; we could live on our family’s sheep farm. She said, of the options, abortion may be simple, but there was the day after that, and the day after that. Maybe if Jevn pays child support and you don’t work for a year? You know you were an accident, right?
    And then Jevn was knocking at my door, before I was ready to hear what he’d decided or tell him what I’d decided, or talk about any of this like it was real. I opened the door, and he stood there surprisingly fresh and energetic. He slipped in nervously, as if he had something to say. He was smiling and avoiding my eyes. His shallow breath made me hope he’d thought of something new. He said he’d gotten up early and taken a shower. He said he’d found himself—smiling. And then he began to float foreign images in front of my mind: keep the child, read it books, take it hiking, wait at the bus stop. He said he thought we should do it: be a family. Me, him, and the third.
    I don’t know what happened then.
    I said no. Listened to myself say it. He said he watched himself hear it. I said it definitively and without qualification. I said never . And though I’d broken up with him countless other times, it was only then that I could see I finally lost him. His bright eyes became gray hollows. He paced my apartment, too large for it, and made me cower.
    *   *   *
    Then a darkness like no nightmare overtook us. The enemy was unknown and invisible, and so we lashed out blindly at each other. Old wounds reopened. I pushed him away. I wanted him out. I wanted to rid myself of the trust and affection that had imprisoned me for so long. I struggled to regain my footing. I couldn’t think clearly with him in front of me, demanding certainty, but I was terrified to be left alone. I pounded my fear into the flesh of his chest, the meat of his shoulders, but as hard as my fists fell, the darkness only deepened.
    Whenever things were difficult before, usually with school, he would remind me to breathe. Or he would say, Remember the river. Not any river in particular. He had his rivers, the ones that barreled through mountains in Colorado, and I had mine, that wound through the valleys of East Tennessee. We were both aliens in the flatlands of Ohio. He would tell me to lift my feet and let the water carry me. Don’t waste energy struggling, just go where it takes me.
    It was an easy image for him, because his natural instincts were like a deep-coursed stream. When he let go, he went far and made beautiful things. He encouraged me, always wanting to know what I was