The fetus came in the mail, zipped up in a plastic bag, along with several anti-abortion pamphlets. It was pink, plastic, and small. Michael Peterson held it in the palm of his hand while he stood in the front yard, the rest of the mail lying at his feet in the lawn. The fetus was about the size of a nickel and a dime put together: the nickel was the fetus’s abdomen, the dime its head. When Michael’s mother, who was making dinner, shouted “Dinner’s ready!” Michael dropped the model into one of his pockets, stuffed the pamphlets into the other, and walked inside the house, carrying the rest of the mail in his hands.
He’d called a pro-life organization the morning after his parents told him that his aunt, his mother’s sister, was pregnant. His parents had shown him a copy of the ultrasound, which was in black and white and looked like nothing in particular. He’d tried making a joke out of it. “It looks like the ghost of a ghost,” he told his mother. She ignored him and asked him to load the dishwasher, one of his chores, and he obliged. But he thought about the ultrasound the entire time.
The fetus was modeled after a twelve-week-old, and the plastic was cheap, with a ridged line that ran all the way around the model, just off-center, marking the point where the plastic had been joined together in manufacturing. The fetus appeared to be cut in half, like an orange. The edge created by the line was sharp and jagged, enough so that when Michael held the model in his hand, tracing the line (the equator, he thought) with the tip of his index finger, he felt as if he might cut himself.
Michael treated the fetus like an action figure: he carried it around in his pocket; he took it out sometimes just to look at; he compared the fetus to his figurines at home, lining them up on the carpet from smallest to largest. He didn’t play with the fetus. There was no way to play with a toy devoid of narrative potential. A fetus didn’t do anything, although he’d heard his mother talking on the phone with her sister in ways that seemed to contradict this. They talked about how the baby kicked when Mozart came on the radio (therefore it must like classical music) or right before bed (it must not be tired yet). Such conversation made the fetus seem animate. Sentient, even.
Which seemed like nonsense when you looked at the dead eyes of the model fetus. There were no eyes, really, just little bits where the plastic had been shaved off, leaving a crater no larger than a dot of ink left by a very small pen. The fetus didn’t do anything. The fetus didn’t have thoughts or listen to music. The fetus was alien.
One day, Michael brought the pamphlets and the fetus to school, where he was in the sixth grade. The pamphlets were stowed in his backpack, hidden inside the pages of a textbook, and the fetus was in his pocket, where it jingled alongside his lunch money. Michael showed the model to only one person, his only friend, Ezra Daniels.
They were standing near the concrete wall, which marked the boundary of their private Christian school. There was a sidewalk on the other side of the wall, as well as a bus shelter. Michael often heard people at the bus shelter talking—yelling profanity, telling jokes, complaining about bus drivers or fellow passengers—but he had never seen anyone waiting for the bus. He’d never been on the other side of the wall. Not on foot. The most he’d done was drive by, in the backseat of his mother’s SUV, where he was protected from the outside world.
Michael handed the fetus to Ezra, who looked down at it skeptically, and let the fetus rest in his palm for a few seconds before handing it back. Ezra’s palm was sweaty and a drop of water lingered on the fetus’s head. Not a tear. The drop was several times bigger than both of the fetus’s eyes combined.
“Why do you even have this?” Ezra asked.
Michael shrugged, as if the question wasn’t worth considering. “I got it in the mail,” he said.
Everyone else was watching or playing touch football. The players grunted whenever “tagged.” The spectators shouted for every touchdown. Michael and Ezra simply stood there, leaning against the boundary wall.
“But why did you bring it to school?”
Michael held the fetus up to the light, as if it were translucent. It wasn’t. There was no life hidden inside the plastic. There was nothing to see. But Michael didn’t want to look at Ezra, didn’t want Ezra to see his disappointment. He put the fetus back into his pocket and turned away from his friend.
“No reason,” he said.
A small controversy arose several weeks later—not over the fetus, which only Michael and Ezra had seen—but over one of the anti-abortion pamphlets. Michael had stuffed the pamphlets into his locker and subsequently forgotten them (he was interested only in the model). But one of the pamphlets fell out of his locker and landed on the hallway floor.
The pamphlet was found the following morning by a sixth grade girl, Martha Nelson, who read the pamphlet in the bathroom, became upset, and called her mother that afternoon. The mother—who was pro-choice—was upset and contacted the principal. The result was that the pamphlet was shown in front of every class and the owner of the pamphlet was asked to come forward. To Michael’s own surprise, he did this. He raised his hand. He stood in front of the class.
When he met with the principal later that same week—the principal assuring Michael’s parents that of course, “personally speaking,” he was pro-life but that their son’s “materials” were nevertheless inappropriate and should not be found within school premises again—Michael was inevitably asked why he’d brought the pamphlets to school.
All he could manage to do was blurt out the words “I’m pro-life!” though that wasn’t why he’d done it. The term “pro-life” had no meaning for him. Michael wasn’t anti-life and didn’t know, really, what it meant to be pro-life. He couldn’t explain how he felt about his aunt’s pregnancy: about how seeing the shadowy figure in the ultrasound (that might be a child, or might be nothing at all) had stirred something within him. How he was fascinated by the fetus. How he felt something strange whenever he balanced it in the palm of his hand. He didn’t know what he felt or why. But he expected that, whatever the reason was, it’d get him in trouble in one way or another. That, if anything, was why he’d brought the fetus and the pamphlets with him to school.
The moment when the teacher had waved the pamphlet in the air and asked for the student responsible to step forward had almost been a relief. He’d been found out. But, to Michael’s disappointment, no one was actually angry. Michael heard his parents speculating about the issue late at night, when they thought he was asleep, his father making the argument that the upset parent was probably “the only liberal mother in the entire school. Or at least the only openly liberal one.” Based on the way Michael’s parents treated him in the following days (they talked to him in low tones, they congratulated him on his test results, they relaxed his chore schedule) it seemed that, if anything, they were proud. They thought he’d done something brave.
That summer, Michael’s aunt gave birth to a child. A baby girl. Michael saw the child for the first time shortly after his aunt returned from the hospital. The baby was swaddled, wrapped carefully in blankets, and positioned within her mother’s arms.
“Do you want to hold her?”
“Yes.”
The baby was small and fragile and Michael listened with care to his aunt’s instructions: how he should hold the baby, how he should position her within the crook of his arm.
So that fall, after returning from summer break, Michael decided to become pregnant. He let those at his school know, too: there was a prominent and undeniable bulge underneath his clothes. The bulge grew larger and larger until, midway through the fall, he gave birth to a child, a girl.
For much of the rest of the semester, he walked from classroom to classroom, from lunch to class, and from class to recess, cradling his daughter in his arms. The child was always swaddled in clothes. No one in the school knew what was underneath the blankets. Something hideous, probably. When teachers were out of range, almost everyone referred to Michael Peterson as “that faggot.” Faggot was an all-inclusive term: it meant that you didn’t fit in.
Occasionally that faggot, Michael Peterson, would forget the bundle or decide to go without it, at which point he looked like the kid he’d been the previous year: slacks a little tattered and frayed at the ends, generic off-brand polo shirts in primary colors. He lowered his head when he walked. He was ashamed of his own behavior—of his façade—but the whole thing felt out of his control. He’d been pregnant and given birth. Now he had a child. He’d had no say in any of it. So, as a mother, he walked with his child in the school hallways and ignored those who mocked him. He didn’t ignore them, he simply took their words and stored them, internalized them for later. In future years, they would serve as a kind of sustenance, until eventually that sustenance ran out. What would he do then?
The fallout was inevitable. No one approved of Michael Peterson’s behavior or came to his defense. The only political message Michael’s parenthood suggested was a toxic, liberal, anti-Christian one. Michael met the resistance of his teachers, peers, and the school administration with a kind of glazed-over, lazy resolve. The whole thing seemed illusory—like something you saw (and forgot) in the moment before drifting off to sleep. Even in the moment, he only half processed what was happening. Michael had no friends that semester. Not even Ezra. Though Ezra was the only person who ever saw his child.
In early December, Michael Peterson took Ezra Daniels aside and led him to his locker. Other than random papers shoved haphazardly into the locker, the bundle was the only thing left.
Michael reached into the locker and grabbed the bundle. He tried to hand the bundle over but Ezra backed away, holding his hands out defensively. Ezra wanted nothing to do with it. So Michael unwrapped the bundle himself.
The blanket was warm. Inside were old newspapers, black ink smeared. Fingerprints. And inside the newspaper—it was like a present, the way Michael had arranged the bundle—there was a figure made of wood. Crude eyes. Notches that had been made in the wood where nostrils should have been, making the figure appear almost snake-like. Red finger nail polish forming upper and lower lips. It looked a little scary, actually, which hadn’t been Michael’s intention. He couldn’t articulate what it was he really wanted.
“I’m not coming back after break,” Michael said. “My parents are pulling me out.”
Ezra didn’t say anything; Michael didn’t expect him to. So, after a few moments, Michael held the stick child in his outstretched arms. Ezra took it in his arms. He held it naturally, the same way Michael’s aunt had told him to hold her daughter. Michael didn’t even have to instruct him.
One of the last people Michael saw before he left the school, never to return again, was the girl who’d found the pamphlet, the girl who’d cried in the restroom after finding it and, later that day, called her mom. Martha Nelson was waiting for her mom to pick her up, lifting her feet off the ground and then stamping them onto the concrete, as if she wanted to leave her imprint there, on the ground.
“Why were you so upset?” Michael asked her.
The girl turned and looked at him, with what at first seemed like anger. But then she took a step back, looked up at the sky for a second, shielding herself with the back of her hand, and when she looked back at Michael there was something else on her face, something he didn’t know how to interpret.
“You don’t get it,” she said.
Michael shook his head, but not in disagreement. “You’re probably right,” he said, “I don’t.”
Martha Nelson’s mom arrived. When Martha spotted her mom’s car she jumped into the air and—this is what Michael thought—it was almost as if her feet might never touch the ground again.
