I.
She had trawled iTunes for the worst sort of music possible to accompany the process, music in quotation marks, "Meditation Trax" where the waveforms of synthetic pan flutes and the built-in Casio drums compete with one another to abrade the tissue of the brain. She would never choose this kind of music under any other circumstances. She is buying it because she has to. This music is appropriate. Even she resents it.
She is in the car now, holding the seatbelt away from her belly, aware of the extent to which there is no overlap between the sets "car designers" and "pregnant women." I'm pushing the speed limit, one, sometimes two miles per hour, and it makes me feel like the tattooed despot of some post-apocalyptic road gang.
Between contractions she has managed to fish out the yoga bullshit from her bag, looks at it, decides against it. She reaches up to the visor, where the disc holder is strapped, and produces Doolittle. It is in immediately, and Debaser scours away the surreal fog which has thus far clung to the proceedings. "Fuck yoga," she says, when her body allows her to speak. She looks out the window, shaking her head. "Goddamned yoga."
I accelerate to thirty-five miles per hour.
II.
I have always felt that I was too conservative in naming your brother, in naming him comfortably, in giving him a name without sufficient destiny. I determined that this would not be your fate, Ronia. You also have a Q, in Quinn, so that when you are forced to append some meaningless form or other with your middle initial, you will deposit a Q thereupon - unleashing it, very nearly unsheathing it, young lady, to dazzle thine enemies.
I need you to be thus armed because I fear your mother and I have played a trick on you; we have brought you to a place where hidden weaponry is sometimes necessary. In our defense, and I recognize that it may be insufficient, this was the only world available to us.
III.
You are alive; you are alive. May I be worthy of you.
