When We Were Agile
"Bitsy" Cole found out she was pregnant approximately eight weeks into the whole thing.
She had been on the stair machine at the gym, working through what she thought was a really unfortunate case of food poisoning for the third day in a row or so, when she suddenly found she wasn't going to be able to work through it any more. From the partially opened stall door in the locker room, her coworker and pilates partner Jill asked her, "You don't think you're pregnant, do you?" She kind of hopped from one foot to the other, as if her feet still hadn't gotten used to the idea that they were no longer climbing steps.
At first, Bitsy just let that one simmer. Ken had earlier joked about an extra bit of fat on her waist. He called it, looking up from the paper, "her spare bicycle tire." Of course, this was in response to her standing before him, yoga-pant-cladded, pointing at her hips, which may have looked less angular than they normally did, so he may have been making fun of her, instead of being brutally honest. She thought, now, of kicking her leg back, knocking Jill's feet out from under her. She pictured Jill sprawling back, arms flailing, the slightest bit of arm flab fluttering in the wind on her descent to the floor. Then she pictured blood spattering everywhere in the bathroom as she hit the tiles, for which she felt a little remorse about imagining kicking her legs out from under her. As she got up, however, flushing the toilet, she did lazily slide her feet closer to the door than she normally would have. She did not connect with Jill's feet at all.
On the way home from work, she picked up a home pregnancy test, headed into the bathroom, peed on the stick, set it aside, and looked out the window for a few minutes.
The line was... she checked the box. Well, two crossed lines if it was positive, one horizontal if it was negative. Wait, this one was... one, ish, vertical. What the hell did that mean?
So she went back down to the pharmacy, picked up a second home pregnancy test, thought better of it, bought a three pack, and drove back home, deposited herself in the bathroom. She then undeposited herself from the bathroom, grabbed a bottle of water from the fridge, and redeposited herself in the bathroom. The next one also had a vertical blue line with a darker horizontal blue line running through it. Crossing it, you might say.
She tried one more, in case she'd tilted it, unintentionally, while it was processing the results. This one, too, looked suspiciously more like a couple of crossed lines.
When Ken came home, she was still in the bathroom, looking at the last test, which she'd still not peed on.
"It says tomorrow morning is a better time to test it," she said to him.
"Cool," he said.
And nine months later, they engineered a little baby boy out into the world. And little fireplug of a thing. This event was not recorded, nor were the five days or so following the event of the birth, on orders of Bitsy.
disclaimer:
Here you are. One more week of winter, one more week of Sane Magazine.
So strap on those ice skates one last time and get goin'!
Of course, Sane will likely still be here, once it's all melted and your lawn is a soggy mess. So the preceding means... little. I suppose.
Oh, and Bitsy makes an appearance in something new I like to call Lemon Wrestler. You'll note this is a working title, and not even a very good one, at that.
Keep your eyes peeled and ears, umm, shucked.
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