God and Jetfire by Amy Seek

milkshakes to my daily diet. Mama’s finally putting some meat on those bones! she teased me, and I left feeling proud of myself, like I’d really accomplished something.
    On the way home, I stopped in to see the woman I worked for in the dean’s office. Cherry was in her sixties and had the disposition of her name. She was cheery and efficient, and small pops and clicks came from her dentures when she spoke. The plastic rims of her glasses and the chain that kept them around her neck were always bumping an earring or a string of pearls or her teeth between her pale pink lips as she pulled her glasses down to give me direction. She was a secretary from the old school; she used an electric typewriter and knew proper shorthand. She was sitting at her desk opening a stack of mail with a long, silver letter opener when I arrived. She took a moment to place me.
    â€œWell, hi , Amy! Come in, come in! I didn’t expect to see you!”
    I stood in front of her desk, as I often did, chatting with her as she arranged things on her blotter and tended the phone, gazing at me blankly when it would ring and she’d put the receiver to her ear. I told her about my internship, and she said it sounded perfectly suited to me. Then I told her I was pregnant, and the smile drained from her eyes. She lowered her glasses to the very tip of her nose and raised her penciled-in eyebrows. She paused for a long time, reading me. “Well,” she said, sighing, “you are about to learn the difference between men and women.”
    I could tell she meant something other than the most important difference, which I already knew about: that the baby would come out of me.
    *   *   *
    Not that that lesson was easy. Jevn and I had just signed up for the free childbirth classes Molly had told us about, and in our first session, the teacher showed us that difference in graphic detail. We sat in front of the television on the carpeted floor of a windowless basement at a crisis pregnancy center. Besides Jevn and me, there were ten unwed girls and about half as many boyfriends. They were not in college or college-bound. They were definitely not studying architecture. But they were mostly unlike us because they planned to keep their babies.
    The scene in the video wasn’t at all like what I’d seen in movies or on television, where women in labor were always screaming at and hitting their husbands, or squeezing their hands until they flinched. Childbirth on TV made you understand it was the worst pain you could ever imagine, and it was always the time when women got back at men for that difference. And for some reason that moment—when the wife reaches out across the divide to strangle her husband—was always accompanied by a laugh track.
    But the birth we watched that evening in class wasn’t a hilarious, bungled race to the hospital. The couple reclined comfortably in bed at home. There weren’t any doctors or nurses. When a contraction came, the mother moaned a little and her husband cradled her head until she fell silent. But in the end, and what left me speechless, was the last sound she made; it was arresting and sincere: the outraged bellow of a large animal, betrayed by its body. A massive head, a horror you never see on television, a bulging perineum, some feces, blood, and other liquids.
    A person came out of a person! It spontaneously erupted from someone’s insides, starting with its black hair, which bobbled in and out for a couple of contractions, and then its face and slick shoulders. It abandoned its container violently, like a parasite discharged from its host, leaving the mother a quiet, crumpled mass, her head tilted back on the pillow.
    I scanned the room; we could all refuse to do this together.
    â€œDid you see that?” The teacher rewound the video. “Okay, right—there, you guys, that squeeze? That’s called the fetal Heimlich.”
    She pulled her