The placenta began to speak a month into my affair with Nick. The baby had gone right down after his lunch—Tofu Pup, rice cake, cup of orange juice. The OJ was our secret. My sister didn’t like Beau to have juice because of the sugar, but I felt sorry for the kid. I believe in sugar.
The placenta said, “Cold.” At least that’s what it sounded like. Which made sense—it was in the freezer.
I opened the door and there it sat in its smudgy Ziploc, the blue-and-green-seal lips open at one corner. Was this Nick’s doing?
Nick was my sister’s husband. He was a vision researcher at Duke. Holograms and stereoscopes. “No matter how small you cut it,” he said, “the part contains the whole.” Once I joked that’s why he liked us both, but he didn’t laugh.
The placenta went through the proper linguistic stages in fast-forward. By two months it spoke in full sentences with subject-verb agreement and by six months it held forth on politics and philosophy. The placenta was a fatalist, like Nick. It rejected free will.
“Sounds like a justification for irresponsibility,” I said.
“Get a cooler, pack me up, let’s drive to Mexico.”
“Don’t be unreasonable.”
In the end, we compromised. I buried it in the garden with a sunflower seed and later that year, after Nick had left us all, we sat and watched the flower’s face track the sun.
Kelly Luce is the author of the short-story collection Three Scenarios in Which Hana Sasaki Grows a Tail, which won Foreword Reviews‘s 2013 Editor’s Choice Prize for Fiction. A native of Illinois, she holds a degree in cognitive science from Northwestern University and an MFA from the Michener Center for Writers at the University of Texas at Austin. She is a fellow at Harvard’s Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study and a contributing editor for Electric Literature. She lives in California’s Santa Cruz Mountains.