Bats or Swallows Read Online Free PDF Page A

pregnancy test at the dep around the corner from her apartment. She has relied on this store for so many essentials: cheap wine, toilet paper, the occasional onion fished out from the dirty bin by the cash register. A pregnancy test is probably pushing it. It’s mid-March and it’s snowing outside, the millionth snowstorm of her first Montreal winter, and she reluctantly heads towards the nearest pharmacy four blocks away. She plucks a test from the harshly lit aisles and returns home, cold and wet and shivery.
Hannah pees on the stick and it turns pink. She’s surprised but not surprised when she learns that pink means positive. (Does it also mean that the baby will be a girl? She reads the package and feels dumb when, obviously, it doesn’t.)
Hannah paces around her apartment in her pyjamas, holds the stick and calculates. Nine months from now will be January, which means the baby will be a Capricorn. A friend had once offered to do her astrological chart, but she turned her down, so Hannah’s only grasping at astrological clues. She’s a Cancer and she knows that Capricorns don’t mesh well with Cancers. Maybe astrology doesn’t apply to mothers and their children?
Eric is an Aries. Hannah knows this because he’d mentioned that he and a friend were going to throw a joint birthday party at the beginning of April. After the third time they’d slept together, he didn’t call for eight days, and then when they finally did talk, they didn’t have much to say to each other. Cancers aren’t supposed to be compatible with Aries either. Maybe astrology was right, maybe the indicators were staring her plain in the face: the stars were misaligned from the very beginning.
3. Extra-Sensory Perception
    Hannah wakes up early the next morning and goes to work. Even before she’s taken off her coat and unwound her scarf, Dominique, who works in the cubicle next to hers, says, “You don’t look very happy today.” Hannah keeps her toque on and complains about how cold it is outside.
They work quietly until a window pops up on her screen reminding her that there’s going to be a baby shower for their coworker, Sylvie, at lunch. Hannah wants to skip it, but Dominique waits for her before leaving.
“There’s going to be cake,” she says, her voice sing-songy and sweet, and Hannah can’t say no.
The department congregates in the cafeteria. Everyone lingers and takes turns touching Sylvie’s belly.
“His foot’s right here,” Sylvie says and holds Dominique’s hand to it.
“I can feel it!” Dominique says. “Hannah, check this!”
Hannah shook Sylvie’s hand when she first transferred to the office, but they’ve never hugged, hardly talked, and a touch like this seems too intimate for people who are practically strangers, so she does it gingerly, awkwardly. She probes the area for a knot of tissue, a baby’s foot pressing against his mother’s insides, but everything is smooth, curved round, like a globe or a medicine ball.
“Oops,” Sylvie says. “He moved. He’s hiding from you.”
Hannah backs up and helps herself to the grocery store cake, and when the baby starts to kick again, she holds up the plastic plate to show that her hands are full.
Back at her desk, she picks up the phone to call Eric. He doesn’t answer so she leaves him a message, a neutral one. He calls back within ten minutes, but when she sees his name on her caller ID she ignores it. She listens to the message before going home for the evening and in it he reminds her of his birthday party. This weekend. You can bring a friend if you want.
4. Exorcism
    It’s a relief to think of time in terms of distance, not growth. Hannah’s driving to Toronto for the weekend and each hour that passes is another 120 kilometres. Before getting the abortion, she worried that for every minute that ticked by, the thing inside of her became more real. More defined. What was a cluster of cells one hour bloomed into an embryo the next and, if