What We Swallow

The bull stood in the pasture across from their rented farmhouse, massive and indifferent. Sarah watched it through the kitchen window while she counted out her eighth pill of the day—a prenatal vitamin the size of a small olive. Her husband Mark had bought the expensive kind with extra DHA and methylfolate, the ones that promised they were doing everything right.

Three years of trying. Three years of temperatures and charts and injections. The bull chewed cud, unaware of the ironies that surrounded him.

"You're obsessing," Mark had said that morning, running his hand through his hair—thinning now, same as hers. They'd stopped at the pharmacy on the way home from the latest specialist, who'd used words like "unexplained" and "consider options" and maybe next time try a different protocol.

Sarah dry-swallowed the vitamin. It caught in her throat.

Their dog, a rescue they'd gotten because pets were easier than babies, or so they'd told themselves, nudged her leg. Barnaby was old now, his muzzle gone white. She'd read somewhere that dogs could smell pregnancy, could sense the hormonal shifts. She wondered what he smelled on her now—disappointment, or something worse.

The community pool opened at noon. Sarah drove there with Barnaby panting in the backseat, though she knew dogs weren't allowed on the pool deck. She just couldn't leave him alone in the quiet house with its empty nursery they'd stopped pretending wasn't a nursery.

She swam laps until her arms burned, until the water drowned out the doctor's voice, until she couldn't remember if she was supposed to start the injections tomorrow or wait for the call. Breaststroke, backstroke, anything to keep moving forward in the blue suspended silence where nothing could catch her.

A teenage lifeguard watched from the chair, bored, chewing gum. Sarah wondered what it was like to be young and not know yet that your body might betray you, that wanting something didn't mean you'd get it, that you could do everything right and still end up here.

She climbed out, water dripping from her hair onto the concrete. The bull was still visible across the road, standing now, watching her. For a moment she felt seen by something ancient and judgmental, something that understood the mathematics of survival and failure.

The vitamin was still dissolving in her stomach, its promises already breaking down into things her body might or might not use. Some things you couldn't swallow your way through.

Barnaby pressed his wet nose to her hand when she returned to the car. She started the engine and drove home to Mark, who would ask how her day was, and she would say fine, and they would not talk about the bull in the field or the vitamins or the fact that they were running out of next times.