Sam texts the inventor, they should invent a baby you can shake. She texts him they should invent a baby who doesn’t change colors. They tell you not to shake your baby but not that you are going to want to. They don’t say that the baby will scream herself purple and that your hands will tense around her small torso and all the time she is discovering shades of eggplant. The only way to cook an eggplant is to slice and salt it thoroughly before letting it sit on a tray lined with paper towels, otherwise it’s too wet. She used to be someone who did this, inserting a knife into the firm crescent and slicing away at the brushed violet flesh. Now the baby screams so loud Sam forgets the word vegetable and can hear color, which is always just red. Fucking red, she thinks. Sam adds wanna shake to the list she is writing on scraps of paper scattered on the counter, and next to the breast pump, and her bedside drawer. On all the paper towels she has no other use for. There is a future where Sam writes a book with all her collected findings and the cover is matte with glossy letters. On the back cover she has a balayage and no recessed gum line. There is a future where Sam takes fifteen hundred Vicodin and walks into the river. She visits often, sometimes with rocks in her pocket, sometimes just walking in a straight line. In a Vicodin future her daughter grows up to be an Olympic swimmer but holds her breath going over bridges. Her daughter has a lover who holds her hand tightly in the center console. He has something urgent to tell her and she has all the air clamped between her teeth for the length of the Ross Island Bridge.

The inventor texts back, technically, they kind of did. Haha, Sam thinks, but doesn’t feel. When the thinking is over she hears a tide coming in. The inventor is up late with her. He is her thinnest friend; his hands tremble when he is drinking and when he is sober, but not so hard that Sam wouldn’t let him hold the baby. In the past they used to have sex. It was many years ago; it feels far away and is always just about to happen. It was mostly killing time between the next thing. The first time it happened, they were watching Star Wars but didn’t even make it past the text scrolling the dark expanse of the galaxy. He was moving in and out of her and blushing, hands on either side of her shoulders. With great interest Sam watched the two of them, her body doing one thing and her mind six feet above her not liking how her hair looked. He’d been beautiful and athletic and sweating directly into her face. Sam’s strongest memory was the salt sting in her eyes.

She considers texting the inventor a picture of her tits, which are attached to a pump she thinks might be haunted, that calls to her mind geese sucked into an airplane engine. More thinking and not feeling. Skin crawling but not moving. In the acknowledgments for her book she will thank the inventor by initials only. Thank you to . for the late night correspondence. In the note she leaves by the river she uses his full name. ___, I’m sorry. I faked it. Her husband reads the acknowledgements and tightens his jaw, her husband reads the note and tears it up, throws it into the incinerator with her remains. In both futures he thinks, but does not feel, how right he was about it the whole time.

The inventor sends her a sketch and it takes Sam a long time to recognize it as a prototype. Crisp letters stamped around the torso of a robot-infant whose head is the only thing that does not move. The limbs flail cartoonishly so she has the satisfaction of real violence but the cranium is protected. She is lying in bed, the baby stretched out beside her nursing, making vulgar gulping noises and shoving against the fat of her stomach. Her fists are clenched ham hocks that do no real harm but Sam resents it, being tenderized like a cutlet, and not even a way she might enjoy. Occasionally the baby rears back to examine her meal, looking the leaking breast right in the eye. Her expression is unfocused and mildly hammered, which is when Sam likes her best and feels the most connected to her. Sam loves breastfeeding, being able to talk about her boobs all the time, all the words she could use to describe them. Sore, swollen, heavy, leaky. A personal favorite: engorged. In these moments she has no desire to shake the baby who was only doing her job (sucking tits) while Sam did hers (being tits) and there was a man somewhere in the house loudly making oatmeal or taking a shit who the other two were neutral towards (his being titless.) Sam texts the man, maybe I should just be tits for the rest of my life and he reacts haha. Not the sound, just the words in a bubble above her message. He is too busy with his oats for her tits. Sam returns to the prototype. The robot baby has a valve for fake pee to come out of. The robot baby has two arms and legs that would flop around if you shook it. The fake pee has a pH balance of seven and is almost as watery. The robot baby’s name is Archibald. Sam named her daughter something tender and old fashioned and after a singer she liked. In the time since her daughter’s birth she had met three other children and two ill behaved dogs with the same name and besides she barely thinks of the baby as Lou. The baby is the baby. The baby is a perfect thing of cream and ribbons. Her toes are the size and shape of shelled peas, her whole being a perfect morsel. The amount of liquid that escapes her takes Sam’s breath away. When she isn’t holding Lou or nursing Lou or shoving her phone in Lou’s face to take a picture of her, Sam can forget her. It feels insane. She told this to the man and he said, it’s not forgetting it’s just thinking about something else, and that too felt insane. Sam could walk out of the nursery and look at her phone or drink a beer or ask the man to fuck her and forget she has a baby until the monitor crackles with noise. She disappears into a chasm where Lou doesn’t exist, and walks right back in the chasm where she does, and in both she is expected to be the same person.

Sam and her tits walk the baby around the block most days. She is supposed to talk to the baby all the time, Lou’s eyes too full of milk and clouds to know what’s going on around her. Babies are born perfect, sure, but also useless.

“We’re going for a walk,” Sam tells her daughter. “I’m your mom. It’s sunny, there’s a plant, it’s kinda pink. That sound’s called barking. Some stupid dog.”

This was how she learned she didn’t know the names of many flowers, types of clouds, or even most kinds of dogs. At night while her husband and daughter sleep she recites all the things she did know. Spaniel, daisy, retriever, yarrow. She says them out loud instead of writing them down. It would be too close to poetry, a thing firmly in the camp of not her business. Sam expects words to be in the right order and making sense. She requires two words to describe water: wet and underneath. Every one of her feels this way; the Sam who gives advice to new mothers tells them not to bother with fine things until the fifth year of life. Up close her balayage is actually a grown out bleach job, and the ends of her hair are thin and splayed. At the book signing a used dryer sheet falls out of her pocket when she reaches for a pen. It’s not the giving up that surprises her audience, but how tired she still seems despite it. If anyone has any more questions, the emcee suggests, but mostly everyone glances at the exit sign. It glows red behind Sam’s head and the audience longs to walk underneath it and into relief. In the one where Sam is in the river, the most like a poet she will ever be, she is thinking fuck, she is thinking she forgot to take her phone out of her pocket, she is thinking blue blue blue. When Sam without Lou walks past River Sam, she thinks she is swimming. She thinks I hate how her hair looks. She wraps a book of baby advice for her sister and texts the inventor, they should invent a haircut that looks good.

Sam is texting the inventor again. She asks him to make her a list of bird songs, tree names, dog breeds, poems he likes. How many words does he know for blue. In half of them she is sending him pictures of her tits. From the bathroom of Powells, from the banks of the Willamette, a hotel room on her honeymoon All the inventors receive them without moving their faces. He goes back to his prototypes–a baby she can shake, a recording of every bird, a camera that identifies trees by their leaf pattern.  Later he puts down his pencil to meet her at a hotel downtown. It used to be a different hotel, the kind that mattered. Sam and the inventor lived through a world where their city was young and important, and the bars were still good. They used to meet at one just underneath this hotel, subterranean and expensive.  She remembers the oysters they ate at that bar on her way to the bottom of the river. She briefly glances at the rocks to check for mollusks, and when she is on her book tour she eats a half dozen at an airport restaurant in Cincinnati. Her mouth both times fills with brine.

The hotel bar is different now, mildly referencing a cantina, but not trying very hard at that. It doesn’t need to, no one stays that long. The whole thing is painted an oppressive shade of marine blue that steals Sam’s ability to take a full breath. Her chest flutters in such a way that the inventor thinks she’d like him to notice her breasts, where for once she is actually trying to let him know that she’s drowning. They are drinking quickly, both there to get it over with again. Upstairs she is pleased to find the walls are only white, the bedspread white, the floors white. From six feet above herself it is easy enough to locate the two of them–the inventor already naked and watching her. He doesn’t have the decency to join her on the ceiling, maintaining his most galling habit of being a person on the ground, always in the same room as himself. She is relieved to find that from above he is still beautiful, still athletic, that she is unable to see his face. There is a way people look at you when they see you the first time after being cut open that feels like none of her business. It’s not even her body anymore anyways, although the inventor his best to remind her what it was like to have one. The particular tidal bore two fingers can induce. They kill each others time between the book deal and the submersion, his Charles Stark prize and the unfortunate incident with the hazardous materials. The cancer that takes years to do its job. Neither of their obituaries mention the things they liked best about the other: his average dick and superhuman efforts to please her, how hard he pressed on his pencils. Her not knowing any kinds of dogs, or birds, or anything except how to want, to be an open mouth and a reaching hand.  ``

At home Lou is forgetting about Sam, just for a minute. The big secret is that babies are so useless because they haven’t committed any crimes against themselves. The big secret is that Lou is currently an Olympic swimmer and also that she is trying in her mind to remember a bird that passed overhead without yet knowing what a bird is. Somebody has something very important to tell her even if she isn’t breathing about it, but right now the Lou’s are reaching for the word wing, for the word feather, for the word dog. All the Lou’s were yet pulling their lips together like they would around a nipple and feeling hungry but not thinking tit, or breast, or milk. Lou is walking around in a room of lack and looking for Sam. She doesn’t even notice that she doesn’t know how to walk yet. A man comes in and she screams at him, his useless body which can only hold her. She is begging for something useful to happen. When Sam follows, smelling weird, smelling like the banks of something, her hair looking like shit, Lou momentarily quiets. They breathe together for a whole five seconds. They take some time to come out of all the rooms they’ve been trying to find the other one in, Sam mostly running and Lou mostly on her hands and knees in pursuit. It would be nice to say that Lou thinks mom, thinks love, thinks their names together like a song but she is too busy being purple. She opens her mouth again, and the river is pouring out.