Maggie; Or, a Man and a Woman Walk Into a Bar

by Katie Yee

I have on good authority (an OB nurse holding court at a friend’s holiday party) that when they are born, children most resemble the father. They have evolved to do so, so the dad will recognize himself in his offspring—and not think them the product of a torrid affair. Even the evolution of newborns assumes a world rife with infidelity. Even babies know to appease the patriarch, to make it known that they are his.

There’s a video somewhere on the internet of a raccoon who has gotten his hands on a tuft of cotton candy. Off he goes to the river—he can’t believe his luck! He begins to wash it, as is his routine, but the cotton candy disappears, slips right between his fingers without his comprehension. That’s what my dreams feel like some days. I wake up and I can’t quite say what happened to them. Wrenched from my hands; lost to the river.

See: the threads coming together, like the end of a Seinfeld episode.

Despite everything (or, perhaps, precisely because of it), I wanted to put the least possible number of lies into the atmosphere of our home, like they were exhaust fumes that would be bad to breathe in, that could stunt growth.

The language of these big life moments isn’t quite right: the way we talk about people who have “lost” their lives. The battle against a cruel disease: a war in which there are no real winners. If you die of cancer, does it make you a loser? It implies a lack of strength, or otherwise a kind of carelessness I cannot reckon with. It robs you of your agency in a way that reminds me of “losing” your virginity. (My college put on its own version of The Vagina Monologues, and my submission went something like: “I didn’t lose my virginity; I know exactly where I put it.”)

You never realize how many people you hate until you try to name a child.

One of the things that has to be determined when a tumor is discovered is how far it’s gone. Has it embedded itself in the tissue? The fact that the body has tissue, built in—the body was born ready to absorb sadness.

In most waiting rooms, there is, for example, always one (1) knitter. It’s never clear what she’s making; you can never quite catch the shape of the thing.