Tuesday, 25 June 2002 | Coworker

The girl who sits next to me behind a cloth collapsible wall has a perfectly round stomach. I'm told there's a baby inside of it, but that's difficult for me to imagine. She drives to work, sits quietly in her cubicle marking up documents with her special green pen, goes to lunch, and comes back again, all the while with a little human leech tagging along. I forget sometimes, but then she'll come whisper some details in my ear and run away laughing, or she'll jokingly do jumping jacks in our boss's office, making him cringe and plead with her not to let go of her package. Once there was free ice cream on offer in the kitchen, and it occurred to me that people with small humans in their bellies reportedly like to eat that sort of thing, so I immediately gave her the news and she seemed excited.

The past few days she's been straightening up her office as if she's preparing to leave the company forever, though I know otherwise. There must be some sort of internal alarm that lets her know it's time to prepare, something like the alarm that lets an animal know when a storm is approaching. And then one day, rather suddenly, she will be absent, her belly will vanish, and there will be another human and another parent.