the inside of frannie’s body.

    My house is a jumpy house. Doors fly open. Windows shudder. There are sighs. Don’t come calling!  My house has something on its mind.
    “Don’t call it that,” my husband says from the other room.  My husband always knows what I am thinking, even if I am in the other room minding my own fucking business.
    “I’ll call it what I want to,” I say. 
    “No really,” he says from the doorway.  “Really, it’s strange.  A house, Frannie?”
    “It is a house,” I say, moving my two hands from my belly and putting them flat against the surface of the granite countertop.
    “It’s a baby,” he says helplessly, his voice taking on a strange lilt, a pleading and begging tone it sometimes gets when we are out to dinner with friends and I have said something I am not supposed to.
    “The baby is not a house,” I say, laughing, “my body is a house.”
    “Your body is just a body.  Don’t be weird, Frannie.”
    “When you have to carry a baby, you can call your body whatever you want,” I say reasonably.  “Besides, I wasn’t even talking to you.  I wasn’t talking to anybody.  You were reading my mind again, which I thought we decided you weren’t going to do anymore.”
    “Don’t be absurd, I can’t read minds,” he says.  He moves around the kitchen like I am the sun, spinning circles around me but never coming very close, lest I burn him and he go up in flames and die screaming.
    “There was that one time I wanted ice cream all day and when you came home from work you had some for me,” I say helpfully.
    “I always bring ice cream home.  You always want ice cream.”
    “There was that time I broke my favorite pair of heels and you went to the store and bought me brand new ones.”
    “I’ve bought you shoes before.”
    “Just now, you knew what I was thinking.  About my body being like a house that won’t stay still.”
    “Have you seen the corkscrew, Frannie?”  He holds a bottle of Malbec in one hand and a wineglass in the other hand.
    “It’s in that drawer,” I say, pointing.  “It’s always been in that drawer.  For six years, we’ve kept the corkscrew in that drawer.”
    “See,” he says, “if I could read your mind I would have known where the corkscrew was.”
    “That doesn’t prove anything.  Aren’t you going to offer me a glass?” I ask.
    “You can’t have any,” he says irritably.
    “At least give me the opportunity to refuse.  It would show how responsible I am.  It would show what a good mother I’ll be for the baby.”
    “Nobody’s saying you’ve got to prove anything,” he says.
    “Nobody’s saying it out loud,” I correct.  “But everyone is waiting for proof.  The doctors and my parents and you.  And even Magpie, she’s waiting for proof.  She can’t yet articulate herself properly, but I can feel her looking at me sometimes.  Sort of expectantly, you know.  Worriedly.”
    “Magpie is not looking at you worriedly.”
    Magpie is our daughter.  She is upstairs now, sleeping, and she is four years old.  Her name is not really Magpie; that is just a nickname.
    “Sometimes her eyes follow me across a room,” I whisper.
    “She’s just a child, Frannie.  Her eyes do not follow you across any rooms.”
    “I think she is very smart for her age.”
    “I do too.”
    “This next baby will be smart like her.”
    “Of course.”
    “Go ahead, then.  Ask me if I’d like a glass.”
    “Would you like a glass of wine, Frannie?”
    “Oh yes, please.”
    He raises his eyebrows.  I laugh.  Ha, ha, ha.
    “That was a joke!  I was joking.  No wine for me, thanks.  I am a house.  There are doors, there are windows.  There is somebody sleeping inside.”
    “Enough with the house, though, Frannie.”
    “Wake Magpie up; I’d like to talk to her.”
    “We’re not waking Magpie up.  It’s the middle of the night.”
    “I want to talk to her.”
    “Talk to me.”
    “You only share half of Magpie’s biological structure.  I want the whole thing.  The whole Magpie.”
    “Talk to her in the morning.”
    He looks tired.  He takes a swallow of wine; runs a hand back through his hair. 
    He’s reading my mind again.  I can feel him searching through the folds of my brain, pulling things back and peering into corners.  I can feel him losing his way in the labyrinthine grooves, the pinky grey corridors.  He passes cabinets full of my memories.  They all have shape and form, color and smell.  They have a pulse. 
    He’s looking for something.  He spends fourteen years wandering around in the shadows of my brain.  He opens many doors and shines a flashlight into many poorly lit corners.  It smells like jasmine in my brain.  It’s suffocating; he can’t stand jasmine.
    He is discouraged.  He can’t seem to find what he is looking for.  He sits on the floor of my brain with his knees pulled up to his chest and his back against some membrane.  He feels warm.  My breathing is all around him and he can feel my blood running through all the veins in my body.  I think maybe he’ll go and see the baby, make sure it’s OK and confirm that I am doing a good job growing it, but he doesn’t.  He stays where he is and he closes his eyes and he falls asleep to the hum of the chemical reactions in my brain.
    It’s like a house, my body.
    I’ll keep both of you safe.