THE INSEMINATION

Insemination #1: We go with donor 4598.  He has good teeth, and mentioned Nietzsche in his personal essay.  Zoe holds my hand while the doctor inserts the catheter.  There’s a scraping feeling.  “Sorry,” the doctor says.  I close my eyes.  Zoe squeezes.  After it’s done, the doctor turns off the overhead fluorescents and our eyes relax into the dim light of the lamp in the corner of the room.  “Mood lighting,” she says as she walks towards the door.  “I’ll be back in fifteen.”  I place my hands over where I imagine the baby growing, and Zoe puts her hand under my paper gown.  “It’s supposed to work better if you’re…aroused.”  In a few minutes, my body convulses and soft moan escapes from my lips.  My feet are still in stirrups.

Insemination #2:  This time we try donor 7688.  He has blond hair and blue eyes like Zoe and he listed carpentry as one of his hobbies.  “I like this one,” she said, pouring over his profile.  She stands beside me and her mouth is a straight line.  I see the small wrinkles around her eyes and the bigger ones in her forehead.  This time the catheter doesn’t hurt at all.  “Your cervix is pointing at me.  That’s a great sign,” the doctor says.  She leaves us alone in the mood lighting, although she doesn’t call it that this time.  Zoe lowers herself between my legs, puts her mouth on me.  Her tongue and lips move over me but she doesn’t use any fingers.  I can’t orgasm.  I try, but my mind just keeps going back to the argument we had in the Lowe’s parking lot the other day.  It was over a weed wacker.  I don’t know if we’re ready for this echoes through my mind while Zoe’s tongue swirls.  After a minute, she stops, rinses out her mouth at the sink in the corner of the room.

Insemination #3: We try donor 4598 again.  This time we paid for his baby pictures and his extended profile.  “Maybe if we can visualize the baby–like really imagine her,” Zoe said.  The doctor squeezes my knee before inserting the catheter.  “We’ll do this as many times as it takes, okay?”  Zoe isn’t holding my hand.  It hurts again like the first time and I wonder if there’s something about donor 4598 that just scrapes, like stubble on a cheek.  Zoe doesn’t touch me and we wait the fifteen minutes in silence.

Insemination #4: I chose donor 6761 this time.  Clean slate, new start.  I liked the darkness of his features in the baby pictures, the long eyelashes.  I read his personal essay twenty times.  I think I have it memorized.  He likes to hike.  He likes to help people.  He thinks of himself as a modern day MacGyver.  Zoe is not here.  She had a work thing she couldn’t get out of.  No pain this time.  When the doctor leaves, I slide my own hand up my paper dress.  I imagine 6761 on top of me, moving inside of me.  It’s so much easier to come this way, with no strings attached, no weed wacker baggage.  When the doctor comes back into the room, she’s smiling at me.  “Get dressed.  I want to show you something.”  Down the hall, she leads me into a little room.  “Look,” she nods towards the microscope.  I peer into the eyepiece, trying to remember how to do this from ninth grade biology.  I see them all at once, long skinny tails like whips, heads leading the way towards the outer edges of the slide.  I am overcome by the aliveness of these little spermatozoa.  “There are some great swimmers in this batch,” she says.  “I have a good feeling about this one.”  I take one more long look.  I imagining me and Zoe holding them cradled in the palms of our hands.

Irene McGarrity has been writing since the tender and awkward age of ten.  Her fiction appears or is forthcoming in Hobart, DOGZPLOT Flash Fiction, Minerva Rising, and other publications.  She has an MFA in creative writing from the New Hampshire Institute of Art, and lives in the Pioneer Valley with her wife, her daughter, and their three cats.