Mari’s seventeen weeks past her due date. They say it happens with your first sometimes.
Oranges are not in season, but they’re the only thing she can eat, thick juice trickling down her belly, onto her bare thighs, stickying the leather of the daybed. Her favorite thing to do these days is to watch Ben play a video game where you toggle your perspective between an atom, a hare, a black hole, a galaxy entire. There are no rules, no completion. She can do this for hours.
Sometimes she looks down at her stomach, wonders if she could still fit into Grandma’s coffin-shaped freezer. Her and her brothers used to be able to Tetris themselves in, all sharp knees and stabby elbows, but only until the freezer was brimming with dozens and dozens of Tupperware of blueberries they had picked over three days at the esker, their backs sore and hunched. The Finnish word for an unexpected texture in food, like the pedicel of a blueberry, is sattuma, coincidence.
Twenty weeks overdue, the pleasant stretch has evolved into a sear. There’s barely enough skin left to cover the mound. They put her on bedrest because she fell down from the porch swing one night, just tipped right over. When they spent the night at Grandma’s after berry picking, awake on a mattress on her bedroom floor, Grandma would sleep-talk, foreign words with a thick accent, empty pleads. Her kitchen was full of washed yogurt containers in neat piles, swaying over the sink, lining up the backsplash behind the cabinets. Mari never saw her reuse one.
They tell her one last push. She can feel herself tear, the pain a bright white light. Ben pats her forehead with a damp towel. They need two people to lift the 16-pound blueberry into her arms, still slick with her insides. The midwife says an Apgar score of ten is unheard of with vaginal delivery, but this one is without flaw – a perfect sphere, plump, smooth like glass. Ben has brought her an orange, but her craving has passed with the birth. She grunts as she leans over, kisses her lips purple.
Emma Tuomi is a copywriter and MSSc who lives and writes in Helsinki, Finland. She has a brand new account on X @tuomi_emma and would love for you to say hi.