Pregnant at least 13 weeks. The doctor tells me she doesn’t think… “Well, I suspect your sac is light.” I ask that my husband come in to see. We just want to see all these moments, every chance we can. “No,” she says, not a good idea. But I feel it. There’s something here. I point to a knot in my stomach, like a hard ball. There are too many nurses around me. I never get to see the ultrasound screen.

One nurse with dark hair sees my razor burn crotch, coming in late, and says, WHAT’S THAT?! as if that’s the reason I’m there. As if that is what we’re dealing with. I get angry, tell her to shut the fuck up. She yells back at me. Then the doctor interrupts. I still can’t believe they won’t let Phil in.

The doctor stops looking, sits back, leaning on the radiator as she says something. I say, stillbirth? No, not that. Then she says she wasn’t going to tell me the sex, a boy, but I won’t be able to have him. “I’m that far along?!” I say.

“Oh, yes, yes,” she says. “But, he won’t survive the seasons.”

I get very frustrated with her, yell that I don’t need metaphors. I need ENGLISH. She has red hair, short, straight, with ugly clear, wide glasses. The white coat. She says, “He’s gotten good at mimicking this stage of pregnancy but won’t survive the rest of it.” She keeps saying “I’ll need to patch,” which to me sounds like D&R. I still don’t understand, tell her I once had a blighted ovum. Is that this? No, there is a heartbeat. There is a sex. She finally says she thinks it’s neo-natal SOMETHING. And I feel like it’s a type of cancer. She says they’ll biopsy the fetus once he’s out. I wake up. Dream over.

I try to figure out if I’m pregnant at all. I’m not. I remember the life I’m living, with my children running around downstairs, I hear them. My lower back hurts, like I’ll have my period soon. I don’t remember what day it is, what the schedule is. I just know that today will feel different, somehow.

I feel angry, boxed out, like someone’s not doing a good job explaining things to me, no matter how many times I ask. I want a second opinion on something, but I can’t figure out what it is. Why do we have dreams like this? What’s it telling me?

The dream just before this one? I was working in some office, on a computer. Movies kept cropping up on my screen, and as much as I tried, I couldn’t figure out a way to mute them without pressing three different buttons. I worried I’d get fired, that they’d think I was goofing off.

Before that, I was in an office that burned down, the whole thing, all the computers. Then I’m at the headhunter being placed for a job I don’t even want. It’s as if I were stuck with a bunch of things I didn’t want, but the one thing I wanted I couldn’t have.

I can’t remember ever yelling at someone the way I did at that nurse who was commenting on my crotch. Asshole never had red ingrown hairs of her own, clearly not a redhead.