My Murder

by Katie Williams

That’s the thing about having a baby: they are a part of you that is outside of you, so you can love them in the way you can’t stand to love yourself.

I began to play the hawk VR after Nova was born, in that time when it felt like I could touch nothing, but everything was always touching me. Nova’s mouth, Silas’s palms, the bedsheets, my clothes, the air, the minutes of the afternoon, all of them were rubbing up against me, pressing down the little hairs on my arms, smudging the outline that delineated me from the world around me.

I thought about how her little face had grown inside me, right there among my guts. She was the only person in the world who had nestled against the inside of my ribs.

Do you ever think about how tears undo themselves as they run down your face, how that’s what crying is, tears unrolling themselves until they are nothing?

. I turned the women’s decisions around and around in my head, as if I could make different ones, as if my attention, my keen attention, could cause everything to turn out differently, as if I could save them myself.