By Jane Wageman
The sonogram revealed, as expected, a record. A large round disc floating in the uterus. She was not a musician, couldn’t even play the piano, barely even followed any bands, but all the signs had been there. She’d been craving jazz and singing songs over the dishes and humming in the elevator and whistling everywhere she went. She was looking for a song, felt like there was a tune she’d forgotten, and then her belly had started to swell slightly, as though she’d breathed so deeply that the air had sunken past the diaphragm, as though she’d mistakenly sunk it too low before a yodel or a scale, but no. She was with child—musical child.
But as she lay on the exam table, her husband by her side, the image faltered. The record went lacey at the edges. They could see that it had none of the precise curves needed to play, that it lacked the shape needed to make a smooth exit from the body, and though the doctor began to speak in encouraging terms—the machine was old, decaying; on another one all might appear fine; they didn’t need to worry, not yet—the blurry beautiful disc slip-slid before them and his tone said otherwise. They all knew.
They stared in silence. She could have remained like that all day, the gel on her skin, the wand pressed to her abdomen, like a fat needle that couldn’t reach past the surface. Would they like to hear the beat? the doctor asked. They would? They did. Oh, and wasn’t it exactly what she thought and nothing like it, come from underwater and never to leave it, the rhythm, the faint little bass line. She could only imagine the melody that would have come next. She could only keep to her head the strange small song.
Jane Wageman holds an MFA from Bowling Green State University. Her fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in Passages North, Wigleaf, Monkeybicycle, trampset, and others. She writes about teaching, writing, and craft at the Substack Quick Bright Things.
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