Cracking Spines

Ecuador! Chile! Peru!

Published by Slush Pile

We worked together at a Russian-fusion restaurant– Jenna had been there six years, I’d been there four– and both of us wanted to quit. But the tips were good at The Estate, and Jenna liked the small interactions with people, asking how was their food, how was their day. At times our relationship was composed of so many minor exchanges, with nothing much larger infiltrating the conversation. By the time she got pregnant, we’d broken up and gotten back together three times spread over as many years.

Ours was not the type of sex that should have produced infants. Ours was exciting, often vertical or three-quarters vertical, kissless, red-faced, spontaneous, and inebriated. We humped like it was the only way to apologize to each other anymore, and we wanted always to prove how much we meant it.

Jenna had grown up in South Dakota before moving to Minneapolis for college, and there was something endearingly rural about her, the baby fat she still had on her cheeks and under her chin, the way she wore a red-checked apron when she cooked (and sometimes nothing else), the way she pronounced long Os with the hint of an L: Doln’t. That summer she’d decided it was time for us to go on vacation together, and had been researching airline prices and different types of sand. This would be her second abortion, and so I deferred everything to her: the decision, the arrangements. She seemed to know exactly what she was doing. To use the word eager would be unfair, but Jenna was certainly adamant about enacting the plans. She was the sort who, once she made a decision (which was actually a fairly rare occurrence; it could take her hours to determine whether she felt like Thai or Vietnamese for dinner) she applied all her energy and attention toward seeing it through.

All week before the appointment she felt a lot on her own breasts, which had grown slightly larger from pregnancy. And I felt a lot on her breasts, too.

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