The Literary Review (winner of the Charles Angoff Award), and The 2005 Robert Olen Butler Prize Stories
“He thought of the rice, beans, applesauce, and milk; the blood, water, and oxygen; the flesh, the genes, the tests charts thermometers tubes locks swabs frustration fear fucking love—everything that had gone into the making of these vibrations under his hand. He felt the kicking and knew it was only a reflex, a neural glitch produced by the spinal cord, like suckling, like blinking, like everything else that babies were supposed to do. All these things–the growth, the anticipation, the kicking, the rooting in deeper—were their child’s portion in life, its personal best.”
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