The Sixth Month

Abstract

The Siamese say that a six-month-old fetus is like a monkey huddled in the rain, trying to warm itself at the base of a tree. The photographs show that this baby is now achingly skinny, with short, squatting legs and a delicate fur. Because it has an inhumanly powerful grip, and more taste buds than it will have when it is born, embryologists say that it still retains some connections with its simian past, connections it will lose in the next sixteen weeks as it grows towards its ℌHomo sapiensℍ future.

The woman concieves. As a mother she is another person than the woman without child. She carries the fruit of the night for nine months in her body. Something grows. Something grows into her life that never again departs from it. She is a mother. She is and remains a mother even though her child dies, though all her children die. For at one time she carried the child under heart. And it does not go out of her heart again.

An Abyssinian Woman