His cough kept him on the edge of a convulsion. It started with a sneeze and soon he was deep in a whirlwind of shudders, and he lost control of his body’s abrupt movements.

Excerpt from The Beast of Gévaudan, a novel

         It suddenly started raining and the only place the Archivist could find to park his car was on the other side of campus. Rain hadn’t been predicted; the sky was clear when he left his apartment, the late spring constellations clustering brightly overhead. He couldn’t see them until he came out from under the trees, though. The Archivist’s street was lined with hawthorns, a fact he would remain ignorant of for the rest of his life, being uninterested for the most part in the living world. Like the stars, the hawthorns’ white flowers were in clusters. Everything was clear and bright, the air so sweet it made him sneeze. Where on earth was the moon? Behind something else. He was trying to locate it when the heavens opened.

         The parking spaces were divided into color-coded areas and came with stickers to match. The red stickers were the most expensive, allowing the operator of a vehicle to park close to the most important buildings; next came the green stickers, followed by the blue, and finally the yellow. The Archivist had never bothered to pay for a parking sticker. He usually walked to work, his apartment being a little less than a mile away from campus. Tonight was a special occasion, though. A local poet who had gone on to achieve greatness had donated her papers to the university, and she was to give a reading in the rare books room, followed by a reception with the Chancellor.

         The Archivist knew the Poet. He had little admiration for her work, and it irked him that he’d been asked to participate in the event, having been charged with providing an introduction for the Chancellor, who would in turn introduce the guest of honor. The Lonely Thoroughfares, the Poet’s first book, had appeared at a particularly difficult time in the Archivist’s life, and he felt like she showed an astounding lack of sympathy for her subject. “Little thing little sniveling thing…” Reading his personally inscribed copy, the Archivist had thought it was almost as if she wanted to make fun of the lonely, of the sorry spectacle they presented, traversing the vast empty thoroughfares of their loneliness. Often in these poems tracks of some kind could be discerned leading into the distance; there would be a leafless tree, an indistinct sound, a choked cry. “Little vagrant…”

         Only one of the critics had remarked on the theft from Hadrian, otherwise Fortuna spit out accolades. As a girl the Poet hadn’t been what you’d call pretty, but at some point that had changed. If the most recent author photo was to be believed, even now, with age making inroads—especially around the eyes and mouth—she remained quite attractive. The photographer had posed her in a straight-backed chair, which seemed appropriate, given her unyielding nature.

         Clearly the evening’s event was going to be unusually well attended. By the time the rain began to fall, those places where a sticker was no longer necessary after five o’clock were already full. The rain was coming down with a force and persistence that made a mockery of windshield wipers. Though the Archivist had put them on their highest setting, he could barely see; every time a car came toward him his windshield turned to a sheet of golden, rippling scales, like a sudden eruption of galaxies or the heaving flank of a giant fish—it would have been beautiful to look at if he didn’t have to drive. Twice he got honked at, once he almost hit a woman he thought he recognized from the political science department. She darted out in front of him in a white, ankle-length raincoat, only to be pulled back at the last minute by her husband, who shook his fist at the retreating car.

         “I’m sorry,” the Archivist said, but of course they couldn’t hear him. As one of the introducers, he had given himself more than ample time to get to campus and park; by now time was running short. The energetic level of conversation that preceded one of these events would have begun its decrescendo into muted speech and, finally, silence. The Chancellor would be scanning the room, pointedly checking his watch, looking for the Archivist. The Poet would be seated in the front row, her head bent over her manuscript, the white stalk of her neck just begging to be slipped in a noose or kissed. XOXO. What kind of an inscription was that, after all those years? “We’ll give him a few minutes,” the Chancellor would be saying, his small mouth pursed with fury. Meanwhile the first weed whacker of the season would have begun tidying the edges of the flowerbeds outside. Like the undead, the university groundskeepers never slept.

         The space the Archivist finally found was at the edge of the blue section, so far removed from the center of campus as to be practically yellow, near Fraternity House Row, a fanciful assortment of structures off to his left whose high gothic style married uneasily with the immense gas grills and piles of athletic equipment filling their courtyards. The Archivist maneuvered his car into the space between two sport utility vehicles. Though it seemed impossible, the rain was coming down harder than ever, its rhythm weirdly syncopated, as if it were being hurled at the body of his car in fistfuls and not falling uniformly from the sky. When he finally opened the door, the Archivist could hear a young man communicating with another young man at the top of his lungs, a string of insults perfectly audible above the sound of the rain. It would be so wonderful to be one of those young men, the Archivist thought, with nowhere to go and no need to make a good impression. He could be drunk and obnoxious and it wouldn’t matter. He could pass out in the driving rain atop a pile of shoulder pads and the world would keep spinning.

         Naturally he hadn’t brought an umbrella—he was going to get drenched. He was going to look pathetic, not unlike Hadrian’s soul. “Little thing, sniveling thing, O where can we put you, dripping and alone?” Immediately ahead and to the right was the apse-shaped back end of January Hall, an immense Romanesque edifice housing several obsolete departments. Once during a snowstorm the Archivist recalled hearing one of his student interns telling another intern that there was a tunnel connecting the basement level of the library with this building. The January Tunnel, the intern explained, pointing down the staircase leading to the stacks, and the Archivist found himself picturing a horsedrawn sleigh flying through a narrow passageway, the occupants wrapped in furs, the tips of the women’s noses bright red. The door at the other end brings you out behind January Hall, the intern had said, near the blue parking lot.

         A curtain of rainwater fell from the eaves of the building; if there was a door there the Archivist certainly couldn’t see one. The Chancellor was no doubt preparing to begin his introduction. The only solution was to take a chance and make a run for it—though if the intern had been lying, by the time the Archivist got to the other side of campus he’d be wet through, the light wool suit he’d bought for the occasion clinging unbecomingly to his sticklike figure. “He looks like you,” the Poet had told him merrily, the first time she got him to play a game of Hangman. She hadn’t been the Poet then—she had just been a standoffish child waiting her turn at the water fountain outside Saint Roch Elementary. When she lowered her lips to drink, he could hear her braces hit the bubbler.

         The Archivist took a breath and dove into the downpour. He couldn’t really tell where he was going; when a door marked “January Tunnel” suddenly appeared in front of him it came as a surprise, as did the fact that he had no trouble getting it open. Once inside, he paused to shake the water from his hair and to wipe his glasses dry on the hem of his dress shirt. The tunnel was well lit, at least at this end—it extended ahead of him a great distance where its brightness devolved into dimness. There was the sound of machinery, a routine thrumming coming from either side as well as overhead, and while there were no machines in view the Archivist wasn’t troubled by the noise. He knew it took an enormous amount of energy to keep a university running smoothly.

         For some reason he couldn’t put his finger on he was feeling happy. Naturally it had been a relief to come in out of the rain—though this particular brand of happiness seemed unrelated to anything as simple as relief. No, there was something about being in the tunnel that was making him feel very happy, almost ecstatically so. Against the wall just inside the door someone had arranged cleaning implements—several brooms, a bucket with a mop in it, a pile of rags—but other than that the tunnel was empty. The walls at this end had been painted with the green, glossy paint beloved of institutions the world over, the paint having been applied in what seemed like a spirit of gay abandon. The smooth concrete floor was splashed with it, and it depended in hardened drips from a series of thin pipes running lengthwise along the ceiling.

         The Archivist’s glasses were steaming up—luckily he hadn’t bothered to tuck his shirt back in. Ever since her cataract surgery the Poet no longer needed corrective lenses of any kind, and at night her gray eyes were said to refract light like an animal’s. The Poet was known for her beautiful eyes, eyes that had been made to appear small and beady throughout her girlhood, due to the unusual thickness of her glasses. For a period she’d worn plaid frames, the plaid of the rims not matching that of the stems. She had been one of the unpopular girls, a condition that hadn’t seemed to bother her, the way being one of the unpopular boys had bothered the Archivist.

         Gradually, as he commenced walking, the Archivist realized he was beginning to hear a second sound insinuating itself under the thrumming sound of the machinery—a fainter sound, more personal, really, in that it seemed meant for his ears alone and not merely a function of the university’s routine operations. Faint and precise, a lightly repeated thwap thwap thwap punctuated with tiny clicks, it suggested the presence of a nearby creature with soft footpads and delicate claws, either running away from him or coaxing him on, though as far as he could tell there was nothing there. Ahead on the left he could see a break in the otherwise unbroken wall that turned out to be a short dark hallway ending with a door that no doubt led to one of the windowless basement-level offices generally bestowed upon adjuncts and teaching assistants. How long had it taken him to crawl his way up from just such an office to the one he had now, with its two large windows facing the graceful, pillared arcade that was one of the university’s celebrated architectural features? Longer than it should have, and the journey had been, frankly, arduous—sacrifices had needed to be made, some of them painful, though in the end all of them had proved worth it.

         Based on the sound of the footfalls it seemed like whatever it was he’d been following had ducked into that approaching, secondary hallway— but when the Archivist looked, the only thing he saw in it was a wadded up ball of paper on the floor near the door, a piece of university letterhead on which someone had drawn ten dashes, penciling in an O above the seventh dash, an X above the eighth. OXOXOXOXOX, the Poet had written in her sloppy mannish handwriting across the title page of his copy of her first book. “This says it all,” she had mumbled, and he knew she didn’t mean hugs and kisses but the design running around the base of the domed ceiling of the symphony hall where he’d taken her to celebrate her sixteenth birthday. “Hug, kiss, hug, kiss,” she’d said during intermission, looking up. She’d sounded exasperated. Though the concert had been atonal and difficult to listen to—not unlike the Poet herself—her exasperation seemed to spring from the fact that such things as hugs and kisses existed in the world. The Archivist smoothed the sheet of paper and tucked it in his breast pocket.

         The further he walked into the tunnel, the more muffled the sound of the machinery; short hallways continued to materialize off to the left, each one culminating in a door with a name card taped to the window. Professor This, Professor That, though clearly none of the occupants had even come close to making full professor. The Archivist recognized some of the names from his stint on CAPT (Committee on Appointments, Promotion and Tenure). Professor Bunting had been a noisy feminist. Professor Liu had been dead for years. All of these offices were dark and the tunnel itself seemed to be growing darker, the light fixtures stationed at greater and greater intervals. Occasionally a door had been left open, revealing a room that looked like it had been abandoned in a great hurry, as if under emergency evacuation orders.

         A period ensued during which the Archivist thought he’d merely imagined the sound of an animal padding along ahead of him; in its place all he could hear was the sound of his stomach. For as long as he could remember he had been prone to anxiety attacks—he hadn’t had a thing to eat since breakfast, nor had he slept well the night before. Ever since the Chancellor’s secretary contacted him about the introduction his appetite had suffered and he’d experienced worse than usual insomnia. “Where was I last Saturday night? Up in the ivy tree. False foxes under me…” How robustly had the Poet ridiculed Helen Vendler’s contention that her Pulitzer winning collection had at its heart a need to come to terms with her own anxiety! “Anxiety is to fear what a canned mushroom is to a truffle,” she had sneered, crumpling the review into a ball before pitching it at him. She had a good arm, the Poet; he’d seen stars more than once during recess games of dodge ball. “Any fool knows my subject is fear,” the Poet went on to say. “Fear stinks like skunk. Anxiety is slippery and odorless.” She told him he put too much faith in the written word, a weird statement coming from a poet, not to mention addressed to a man who’d spent the better part of his life among the archives.

         The tunnel floor was showing signs of increasingly poor drainage. The Archivist had to watch where he put his feet in order to protect his expensive Italian shoes and to keep from slipping—at first he could step over or around the puddles, though eventually there was no way to avoid stepping directly into foul pools of standing water. The quality of the light, too, seemed to be decaying, though ironically enough, the dimmer the tunnel got the further ahead in it he was able to see. At last he thought he could make out the shadowy shape of what certainly looked like an animal, low slung and with a tail that appeared surprisingly full, resplendent even. The animal was slinking along the left-hand side of the tunnel, disappearing from time to time into one or another of the secondary hallways, only to emerge once again further ahead. It was difficult to tell what color she was: sometimes her coat seemed spectral and gray, at other times russet, vulpine. Despite what his eyes told him, though, his sense of the creature—the image she created in his mind—was of pure whiteness.

         She would be upset that the Archivist wasn’t there to hear her. She planned to read from her latest collection, the title of which she’d refused to reveal to anyone, though her editor must have known it. The publication date was still a week off.

         She used to like it when the Archivist brushed her hair, which was surprisingly thick for being so straight, and which she wore long, though often wrenched back into a small, tight knob at the nape of her neck. That was the one aspect of their marriage that always went smoothly—the Poet liked to be groomed, though not for too long, and not with any sense of personal involvement on the part of the groomer. If the Archivist expelled breath, made it clear that the act of grooming her was arousing him, she would bat the brush from his hand. “How many letters?” she would ask, leaning close, her eyes sparkling. She would pick up a pad of paper and draw a gallows, underscored by a series of dashes. “How many letters in, oh, I don’t know, ‘dream on’?”

         The first bite, when it came, was more like a playful nip; the second tore through the light wool of his pant leg.

         The main axis of the campus, as the Archivist knew, ran east to west, in homage to the Trail of Tears. The January Tunnel, on the other hand—as the Archivist would only learn much later—ran south to north, in homage to the Suspension of Misrule, also known as Thule.

 I.



 



When I was about six weeks old and still inside my mother, my milk lines formed. This happens in every mammal: the skin of the fetus suddenly thickens along two parallel lines that run diagonally from the groin to the armpits. Then, just as quickly as they form, the mountain ranges collapse back onto the skin. Within just three weeks they have disappeared almost completely, leaving behind only two small peaks at the chest. These are the buds from which future nipples will form. Other mammals have different rates of milk line recession, resulting in more nipples later on. Pigs, for example, can have as many as eighteen nipples from which little piglets can suck.Humans would ideally have two nipples, and in some cases where the recession does not happen properly, third nipples will grow out from the improperly reduced milk line. Luckily, or perhaps not so luckily for me, I came into the world with the correct number of mammary seeds planted in my chest. 



I felt them when I was nine, sitting in front of the computer after dinner and playing Snake. Something compelled me to reach under my shirt. Perhaps it was just natural childhood inquisitiveness—students in my class that year had started to whisper things they somehow knew should not be heard by our teacher. Or perhaps it was an odd new sensation of my shirt rubbing against something that had not been there before. 



The giggling curiosity that compelled me, as well as all the other blushing boys and girls, was a byproduct of having new chemicals inside my body, in all of our bodies. My ovaries, having received some very specific chemical inclinations, had begun seeping estrogen into the bloodstream. When the signals reached my chest, the seeds started to grow, evolving into a lump of milk, tissue, and glands, otherwise known as a breast bud. The more precise term is *thelarche*, which derives from two Greek words: *thele*, meaning nipple, and *arche*, meaning the beginning, or onset.



I made sure that no one else was close by and slid my right hand up to my chest, massaging the area under the left nipple. A hard lump, like a little stone, was lodged underneath the skin. At first I was unsure if it truly existed, but each trial resulted in the same discovery: a nickel sized lump nested right under the left nipple. It hurt when I squeezed it too hard, and I kept pinching, as if in a dream, the pain affirming its existence. I checked the right side, and sure enough, it had its own bump. It was smaller, but it ached the same. The stones were real. I could not excise them from my body, and I could tell no one. 



What I did do, however, was observe. I figured whatever happened to my older sisters would inevitably happen to me. My middle sister, seven years older than me, bore the biggest breasts, the most slender neck, and the daintiest wrists. Her unique combination of beauty traits made her a pageant queen many times over, but we will not get into that.I knew that my neck was shorter and that my bones were thicker than hers, so there was never any hope of competing with that. However, I gauged that there was potential in my breasts. On the weekends I sat on the bed examining the way she applied mascara and lipstick, brushed on rouge and eyeshadow, and put every hair in place. Most of all, I admired the portion of fabric that stretched between the two mounds of her chest, wondering when the day would come that my body could impose the same physical effect on the fabric surrounding me. 



 



II.



 



I came home from the fifth grade one day, and my mom handed me my first bra. “You’re a big girl now,” she said, “You need to wear this.” This first one was a simple sports bra, with the most intricate part being the elastic band that clung like death to my chest. I could not see any practicality in wearing it, only that it helped me fit in with the other girls in the locker room. It still seemed possible, perhaps, that these things were temporary, and by tomorrow we would be free of them. That same year, I was taught that the sun would someday die, and I, feeling the pressure of the contraption beneath my shirt, realized that my childhood, too, would eventually dissipate just like the sun.



The sports bras turned into slightly more shaped training bras, where the cut and design suggested something a bit more feminine. The day came when my two sisters took me to Victoria’s Secret to buy my first real bra, like the ones my mom wore. “See the numbers? That’s for the diameter of your chest.” They said. “You’re a 32.” They explained the meaning of the letters, the clasps, the straps, and how the cups should never ride up when I raise my arms to the air. If they do, then I should loosen the straps, and they taught me how to do that too. We settled with a black bra with no metal reinforcement or padding, frills or laces. It was a polyester and spandex breed that sat smoothly on my skin, invisible to anyone but myself. “You’re an A cup,” my sisters said. I repeated that in my head. My breasts seemed so inadequate next to theirs, but at the end of the day, I was glad to have my letter.  



Aside from the excitement of having something that all the other women in my family wore, I still could not see the purpose of bras. And so, inevitably, there were times when I neglected to wear one. This happened when I was ten and traveling back to Vietnam. My grandfather was a monk, and we visited him at his temple. When we arrived at the ornamented gates outside his residence, my eldest sister looked at me, furrowed her brows, and asked me why I was not wearing my bra. I had simply forgotten. Though I asked why it was so important, she did not explain her concern and instead just told me to keep my arms folded over my chest. 



The temple had a courtyard at the center with statues and bonsai trees. When we had finished drinking tea outside my grandfather’s dormitory, I ran to the courtyard, sat down beneath a Bodhi tree, and posed as the meditating Buddha. Then we all lined up along either side of my grandfather and smiled at the camera. When we came back from the trip, I looked back at the photographs and was shocked to see that my nipples were very clearly protruding through the shirt in every picture. It then became clear why my sister had told me to cross my arms. I learned that nipples were something to be ashamed of, and since then, I have worn a bra every single day of my life. 



 



III.



 



It turns out that the body carries its own natural brassiere. Coopers ligaments, a set of connective tissue, are accredited for maintaining the shape and position of breasts. The ligaments descend from the clavicle and stretch through and around breast tissue. The clavicle thus becomes the line demarcating the beginning of breasts, and this may partly explain the sexual allure of that bone. 



Cooper’s ligaments are named after Sir Astley Cooper, a British surgeon and anatomist who first described these ligaments in 1840. He also named many other anatomical parts, including Cooper's fascia, a thin film covering the spermatic cord; Cooper's pubic ligament, the superior [pubic ligament](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pectineal_ligament); Cooper's stripes, a fibrous structure in the [ulnar](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ulna) ligaments, and a variety of diseases. 



Cooper is not the only man to insert his name into various aspects of the female body. Roughly a century after Cooper coined his ligaments, a pediatric endocrinologist by the name of James Tanner, who was also a Brit, came up with a system to measure breast development. Aside from breasts, he also demarcates stages in the development of genitals and pubic hair for both girls and boys.His scale, appropriately called the Tanner scale, defines five stages of physical development based on external sex characteristics. 



In Tanner’s world, Stage One features nothing but the nipple floating on a sea of skin. There are no glands, ducts, or lobules, only the remnants of the milk ridges from the fetal landscape. Stage Two, and the thelarches form; I am playing Snake, feeling the buds. Stage Three, a continuation of Stage Two as I sit with my nipples exposed underneath the Bodhi tree. In Stage Four, the nipples start to protrude from the surrounding breast tissue, and I have sex for the first time. During those years, my left breast was frequently bigger than my right, as is common in many women, but my boyfriends didn’t seem to mind. 



 



IV.



 



At this point in my life, I have reason to believe that my breasts are mature, and that if Tanner, were he still alive and could analyze them, would surely place me in that fifth and final stage. But for several years, from when I was nineteen to twenty-two years old, I put no thought into my breasts. They seemed inert and happy as they were, and I conducted my relationships fairly confident in my body’s ability to allure. 



It did not occur to me that they had grown silently until I went to Victoria’s Secret to replace my old bras. The sales representative asked me what size I was looking for. I told her 34B, at which point she made a face and said, after glancing at my chest, “Really? No, you’re definitely a C.” I felt a bit violated that she could look through me like that, but also flattered. A part of me also questioned my feeling of flattery as a product of her attempt to sell a bra, knowing that Victoria’s Secret sometimes uses vanity sizes to make women feel more accomplished about their sexual development. Nevertheless, I tried the C’s, and they fit better than the B’s. 



I remained incredulous for quite some time. I never thought that I would someday be able to match my sisters in breast size, but since then multiple incidences have me think that my breasts have become substantial. My boyfriend, whom I was in a long distance relationship at the time, told me each time we met that they were bigger. They were also more or less the same size which suggests that they had reached beyond the growing phase of Stage Four. At one point, out of the blue, he also told me that I had nice breasts. I asked him why they were nice, and he explained that they were very round and full, and the nipples pointed in the same direction. Though the relationship did not last, I will always remember him fondly for those words.



More recently, a young man asked me while we laid in bed if my breasts were fake. I sat up, wide eyed, and exclaimed that they were real. “Are you kidding me? Fake boobs are hard and cold, and not nearly as sensitive.” I said. “Mine are soft!” 



I said these things with confidence because my aunt has fake breasts, and she let us touch them. A week after her operation, she sat with us at dinner, and the topic settled on her implants. “Do you want to see?” She asked. Before anyone could give a response, she unbuttoned her shirt halfway and pulled out her left breast. My mother, father, sisters and I took turns pressing down on the engorged organs as the food grew cold on the table. They felt stiff and plastic, nothing like what their roundness implied, and judging from the blank expressions on my aunt’s face as we probed her chest, they were not very sensitive either. Nevertheless, they were beautiful.



After telling him that story, I cupped each breast in my hand, as if checking that my assertions were true. Each one filled up my palms with heavy, soft flesh that bulged out between the fingers. They felt solid and warm on my body. The weight of my womanhood suddenly felt very clear to me.



 



V.



 



The baby looks a lot smaller than he does in the pictures. “Be prepared for flashes of nudity,” my sister says. “The boy has to feed every two hours.” She paused, as if thinking about something, and a look of vague revulsion creeps onto her face. “My breasts are huge now, look.” She lifts up her shirt. 



I stare, wide-eyed. They are immense. I feel inclined to look away but cannot stop staring, as if her mammary demanded worship. Both breasts have inflated to about twice their size before pregnancy. They sag with the weight of milk and hang from her body like ripe papayas, dripping with sap, from the tree. Fresh veins, which have grown to supply blood to the glands now in full operation, decorate the surface of her pale, smooth skin. The nipples, once small and innocent, have darkened and grown into long, meaty tubes that now give milk. 



The source of this milk comes from deep within the breast, inside little chambers called alveoli. Like underground caves with dripping stalactites, the alveoli are lined with secreting cells that trickle milk into little holding places called lobules. Bunches of lobules congregate to form a lobe, which empties its contents into a lactiferous duct that flows all the way to the nipple. Each breast contains ten to twenty of these lobes arranged like flower petals around the center. I can see the ends of those ducts clearly on the surface of my sister’s skin. They appear as little elevated dots that sprout in a circle much like the way mushrooms grow around in a fairy ring. 



“This is a good learning experience for you,” she says as she breastfeeds the small, squirming child. He clings to the softness of her chest, and I think of Henry Harlow’s monkeys. 



The experiments started in the 1950s. Harlow used Rhesus monkeys. He took the babies away from their mothers at birth and raised them on two types of surrogates: a bare wire mesh monkey and another one covered in cloth. They were both equipped to dispense milk through a nipples at the chest. Harlow found that the baby monkeys held onto the cloth mother for longer periods of time. In modified experiments, both surrogates were available, but the cloth mother no longer provided milk. Despite the wire monkey’s ability to feed, the baby monkeys still spent most of their time hugging their fuzzier option. If they were hungry, they would clamber up the bony frame of the metal mother, feed themselves, and then run back to the softer mother, their eyes wet with need.   



The way these monkeys held onto the cloth surrogate is not too different from the way Joseph lies on my sister’s body. His head fits perfectly into the crevice of her breasts, and his arms splay out comfortably on top of her milk-filled pillows. It is as if everything beforehand, the bras, the beauty pageants, the cleavage, attraction, and the buildup of glands, all existed in order to build up to this one moment when the breast, engorged to its limit with milk, can expunge its contents into the hungry mouth of an infant.



It is two in the morning, and I tell my sister that after witnessing her sleep deprivation and hearing of the rips and tears and screams that occurred during her fifteen hour labor, I do not want to have kids. She doesn’t respond, but I know she is listening. When she finishes feeding, she asks me, “Does Auntie My Ngoc want to hold Baby Joseph?” 



I nod excitedly, and pick him up with both hands, making sure to support his neck. The baby lies cradled in my elbow, gurgling. He looks like both his parents. He has his dad’s long torso and limbs, his eyes, and his lips. He has the tip of my sister’s nose perched on a bridge that resembles that of his fathers. My sister goes to get some rest. 



I rock Joseph back and forth. His mouth points towards my breast, and I am painfully aware of how incapable my body is to nurture him. His eyes start to close for longer periods of time, and I can tell that sleep is settling. Something gives me the idea to hum jazz melodies to him, for they are the only melodies I know at heart these days. I start with Stardust, then Someone to Watch Over Me. By the time I am halfway through Misty, the baby is fast asleep. I hold him for just a bit longer, even though his tiny body was starting to feel heavy against my chest.