THE WINTER WIND WENT AWAY LITTLE BY little. I put away my coat with the big buttons with the faces of grizzly bears on them. Children started coming out of hibernation. They seemed dangerous to me now that I was pregnant.
A child wrote its name on the wall with a black crayon. The child wrote that it was in love with someone named Roger. Every day there was something new written by this child on the wall. What could you do? You would have to put out a trap with a candy in it to catch the child and break its neck.
A kid made mud pies in aluminum dishes with tiny stones on top to decorate them. They were all over the back stairs.
I opened the mailbox and marbles poured out. There were orange plastic soldiers hanging by strings from the bush. There was Monopoly money under the windshield wiper of the car. There was an egg carton filled with bean sprouts on the windowsill in the stairwell.
The circulars had all been turned into diminutive ships and were sailing off on the sea in the pond in the park. It was an armada that had snuck up on us during the night.
Soon they would win. One day, with their plastic swords, their cork guns, their snowballs. They were amassing an army and stockpiling weapons. We just weren’t paying attention.
On the way home from work, Raphaël and I found ourselves stopping to stare at children when we were walking down the street. It was as if each child might be ours and we were trying to recognize it.
I noticed someone taking a photo of us across the street. They had begun taking photographs of our family no matter what the hell we were doing. There were photographs of us eating sandwiches in the park. I ignored the man and kept walking with Raphaël, staring at babies.
We had no idea what the connection was between the baby that was inside of me and the kids who were running around. We weren’t really convinced that because I was pregnant, it followed that I was going to have one of these odd little creatures.
Anyways, the baby was so teeny at this point that I didn’t even know where it was most of the time. It was like Pluto. We knew that it was way, way out in the universe, because somebody told us that it was. And we took them at their word. We really had no empirical proof of that ridiculously small planet ourselves.
“When I was little, there was an old man who worked at the corner store,” Raphaël said. “And he had tattoos of butterflies on each hand. I thought that he had been born with those tattoos.”
It made me happy when he said that. He remembered something beautiful about being a child. Raphaël seemed to be much better since he had found out that I was going to have a baby.
We lay in bed talking.
“What are we going to name it?” I asked.
“I hope it’s a girl. I wouldn’t want to be responsible for bringing another man into the world.”
“Let’s name her Fleur, after the skunk with the long eyelashes.”
“Let’s name her Nouschka. I love your name.”
“Let’s build her hundreds of snowmen and make sure every snowman has a hat on its head.”
“Let’s never ever make her wear a woolly, scratchy sweater.”
“Let’s not tell her about death for a long, long time.”
We didn’t have a philosophy of child rearing. But like every couple who are expecting a child, we thought that we would do it differently. We would do it our own way. We would be the parents that we hadn’t had. People who have had bad childhoods are always excited when babies are on the way. They make the mistake of believing that just because they know what a horrible childhood is, they will know the opposite.