Illustration by Rama Duwaji
Until Jonathan came along—if that was even his name—Chris had been a half-hearted swiper. The ink on her divorce was dry enough to take a gander at the pre-loved goods, but she was no giddy kid in a candy store. When her other single friends told their horror stories, she murmured the appropriate consolations but privately felt a bit reproving, even smug. She would not have gone on a second date with a man whose tattoo read “twin flame,” or mounted the scooter of a woman who’d ordered a neat whiskey at brunch, or helped a man who had railed against OnlyFans pick out a modest tankini for his niece, or agreed to dog-sit a new lover’s poorly house-trained Hungarian puli. Her friends invoked threadbare internet speak to assassinate characters: the malignant narcissist who love-bombed and future-faked, the avoidant who gaslit via slow fade. Her friends bemoaned their own broken pickers.
Meanwhile Chris went on dates with evolved and responsible divorced dads, amicably co-parenting with their best friend. There was the environmental lawyer training for the marathon, the accountant whose practice touted tax breaks for artists and the self-employed, the Howard Zinn–inflected history teacher at St. Ann’s. Chris was forty and normal. Her dates were with normal guys too.
Her own divorce had been amicable enough, if (of course) very sad and all that. She and Eric had met in 2005 as sophomores at the University of Chicago and had been good platonic pals until two weeks before graduation. One early evening after a sweaty game of small-side soccer, they got cones from Kilwins and took them to Promontory Point and sat on a ledge and the current switched. Before the risk of the kiss, Chris had some butterflies, but within it there was no roller-coaster stomach drop. It was pleasurable in the way of a warm bath or a scenic stroll or an ice cream cone (Eric smelled of rocky road). The change in their relationship was calm and sturdy from the jump.
Chris supported Eric as he plowed through medical school at Northwestern; Eric supported Chris in her pursuit of a master’s in library science at U of I Urbana. They got married in Bucks County and moved to New York for Eric’s surgical residency in otorhinolaryngology at Montefiore Einstein. And things remained sturdily calm—happy even—until they started trying for a baby. Chris had little baby fever. Eric’s was already raging. He came from a big Midwestern family.
They were both thirty-four when Chris got her IUD removed, thinking in the way of chill healthy people that it would happen when it happened. After six months of nothing, that posture gave way to ovulation predictor kits and sex joyless as calisthenics. Boatloads of auto-shipped CoQ10 arrived for the both of them—to Eric’s credit, he did not assume the fault lay with Chris’s body or biology—but when fertility clinics were in full swing again post-COVID, they saw a reproductive endocrinologist who ran the gamut of tests, pronouncing Eric’s semen “brilliant” and Chris’s ovarian reserve “diminished.” Three IUIs failed in painstaking succession.
The fault line forming between them grew a millimeter each day as Eric embarked on a pressure campaign on behalf of medical science and the miracle of IVF. Did she know how lucky they were that their health insurance covered up to $30k of treatment? His colleague at Sinai had done six back-to-back retrievals and remained unflagging at her post; how bad could it really be?
In her professional capacity at the Brooklyn Public Library’s Central Branch, Chris interacted with many more children than Eric. They tended to be screaming and covered in crumbs. Their mothers were beleaguered, their nannies were on their phones. Their fathers were mostly offstage. Tending to a toddler (as when Chris and Eric went to Wisconsin for the holidays and she was left alone for a spell with one of his little niblings) struck Chris as careworn torture, boring until it was terrifying. Stacking and unstacking mixing bowls, throwing them like Frisbees, crashing them like cymbals, till one ricocheted off the side of the cabinet, smacking Ollie between his eyes. The boo-boo beaded with blood. Ollie’s mother looked at Chris as if she had hit him.
But Eric cajoled and wheedled and Chris caved and did a retrieval at age thirty-six. She felt rotten the whole time, bloated and moody and defective. They got seven eggs, six of which fertilized. Three formed blastocysts and were sent away for testing, and two were aneuploid (so many vocabulary words she did not care to learn), but one was a PGT-A normal 5AB that they transferred. It did not stick. She was talked into a second retrieval, which blew through a chunk of their savings. Nine eggs, all fertilized. None made it to blast.
Chris returned to her baseline soma and felt like herself for the first time in nine months. Eric’s head was in his hands a lot. He did not want to “maybe foster-to-adopt, down the road,” or return to trying naturally, crossing their fingers for a stroke of luck. He wanted Chris to muscle through a third round. Chris said that the scientists didn’t know everything under the sun, and more to the point, she had liked their life before all this and could like it again, if Eric could find it in himself to like it too; a child wasn’t in the cards for every couple; weren’t she and her love enough? Eric said they should face facts and the ticking clock and make use of the tools at hand. It was an impasse they could not find their way around, and yet, Chris understood his position and sympathized, and he understood Chris’s and sympathized too. He knew it was unfair that her body bore the brunt of the interventions. She knew that his desire to be a dad was primal, and for her to call it quits was a unilateral gesture that could well deprive him of a biological child. And so, after a year of talking in circles, they separated. Eric found an apartment uptown and left Chris in Brooklyn Heights with Mamie, their six-year-old Siamese. The years she’d spent feeling like a broken vessel gave way to a modicum of freedom and relief. She wondered sometimes if their trouble conceiving was an indication that somewhere deep down their chemistry was off. Maybe they should have stayed just friends, and both held out for the kind of passion with someone else that led to an unplanned oopsie.
“Jonathan” crossed her transom a year and a half after she and Eric split. On February 14, 2025, he sent her an icon of a cherry-topped banana split, a token of the platform’s currency. He was not a divorced dad, nor any kind of cautious or sensible choice; he was twenty-nine and a professional poker player and traveled a lot for tournaments, or so he said; in the aftermath of their puff-of-smoke affair she had searched him up far and wide and found no trace of him in the poker world. Maybe he had a stage name.
They’d seen each other just twice but the dates happened on consecutive days—for a hot sec they couldn’t get enough of each other!—and each had cascaded into hours of electrifying companionship that created the illusion of knowing him better than she did. Each had been a jolt of adrenaline and an emotional bender. In the weeks—admit it, months—thereafter, it was frankly embarrassing how often she thought of him and wondered after him. Chris did not consider herself a person who much trafficked in cliché yet there had been a whiff of the bad boy about this man and she had responded like a hungry dog. Like when he grabbed her hand to jaywalk the West Side Highway. Or, as if on a whim, swerved into what appeared to be a random mixed-use building in the Flatiron—later it occurred to her that he might have lived there, but at the time it had seemed like a magic trick, the way he nodded nonchalantly to the sentry at the desk and hopped a freight elevator and led her up and out onto a bootleg roof-deck, where the railing was flimsy and the view was panoramic and spectacular. He proffered a weed pen. She partook. Golden-hour rays winked off sharp glass silhouettes and her sternum felt like a runny egg. Was it crazy to chance being shoved off a roof by an internet stranger? Maybe so, but she survived, and they drank Yemeni coffee in a little shop full of carpets.
Their second date started in an Irish dive and after a shot of Jamo and a pint of Guinness for him and two vodka tonics for her (she paid the tab, she was feeling liquid as a sugar mama), he suggested they head to Rao’s in his Acura which—he pointed through the filmy window—was parked just there, and what’s more, did she feel like driving, and he tossed her the keys, such trust. She was alert with curiosity and desire and caught the keys and seized the wheel. As they traveled north on the FDR he informed her that the old-school Italian joint in East Harlem was rumored to be a genteel stranglehold of the mob, off-limits to the general public but his dentist, who was also his uncle, happened to be a table owner. The restaurant was dim and tiny, with many photos of celebrity patrons crowding the wood-paneled walls in curious juxtaposition to the half-empty dining room. Jonathan whispered something to the host and they were seated among a handful of boomers and she tasted the famous red sauce, familiar to her from the bottles in the grocery aisle, straight from the spigot.
He was simultaneously decisive and improvisatory, a narcotic combo, the masculine answer to a manic pixie fantasy. He was also still as a coiled snake, with hooded deep-set eyes so dark they looked black, and he was deft with demurral, deferral, and rich stimulating silence. In person, in the moment, he did not seem squirrely, he seemed mysterious and charismatic, his sparse replies to her questions about his profession, his upbringing, his friends suspect only in retrospect. He did drop that he’d once won $500,000 at a table and it was part of his magicianship that the information, threaded into the easy slipstream of their conversation, came across as offhand and not strategic or wildly boastful.
Later she would wonder if that outrageous winning was a total lie. She would feel ashamed of what he had revealed in her: the ferocity of her craving to be the center of someone’s attention. The center of Eric’s attention had become her uterus, it had eclipsed his interest in her personhood, whereas Jonathan asked simple questions with intelligent follow-ups and looked so rapt as she spoke that she found herself talking and talking about her life—her mainly tranquil childhood, the incident of sexual assault (indecent exposure by an assistant softball coach) she sometimes felt ought to have traumatized her more than it did, her father’s MS diagnosis when he was fifty and she seventeen, her sister’s horses Starlight and Domino, her dissolved marriage and the dwindled contents of her ovaries, the dream catcher she was crocheting. She even broached the spicy historical romantasy, set in the Scottish moors c. 1880 and featuring a strong and silent wulver and a dematerializing unicorn, that she’d finally begun to write after Eric moved out! What had inclined her to tell him anything at all about that top-secret project, imagined in three volumes, working title A Bairn of Summer Rain? He said with disarming sincerity that she was the least boring librarian in the world. He paid for dinner with a flourish, in cash.
Chris had never driven in New York City, though Eric had browsed the Kelley Blue Book in anticipation of having a child. Behind Jonathan’s wheel, she found she enjoyed it, the stop-start maze of it, the pedestrians darting as recklessly as she and Jonathan had done when they made a dash toward the floating park that was once Pier 54. On their way uptown, as they came onto First Ave at 96th Street, a siren whooped behind them and Chris startled—was she going to incur a ticket for a minor infraction, or worse, a DUI that would ruin everything? But the cop only informed them that the car had a broken taillight, they should get on that, and if Chris lived in New York City she should not be driving with an out-of-state license. Jonathan had been so nonchalant about the taillight. He said this was the third cop who’d pestered him about it. What arrogant disregard for the husbandry of city life, she thought with hindsight.
From Rao’s Chris had driven them to her apartment and the sex sizzled under Mamie’s judgmental ice-blue gaze. No condom, how stupid was she. He pulled out and came in his hand. Mamie swished her tail. He stayed over and snuggled and in the morning she walked him to his car. He smoothed a stray baby hair behind her ear before he got in and drove away.
Chris sent a message two days later, hey that was fun, we should do it again, no reply. A week after that she wrote to thank him for the evening he’d put together and she hoped he was doing well, her tone stilted and formal, as if he had interviewed her for a job. No reply. The next day, still thinking about the sexy things he’d said in the heat of the moment at her place, she sent a sext for the first time in her life and when there was no reply to that, her humiliation felt altogether complete. She hated him for having reduced her to this pile of naked need.
She was a ravenous glutton for punishment, it seemed, for eight hours later she pressed send on a most pathetic missive, a toothless attempt at having the last word: I guess that’s it? Swing by the BPL sometime, I’d love to help you find whatever else it is you’re looking for. Her iMessage bubbles had heretofore been blue; this one landed as an SMS, green. The picture she’d sent of herself in black lace lingerie, tugging aside the crotch of the panties to reveal a wisp of pubic hair, a wing of labia majora—had it been so offensively underwhelming that he’d actually blocked her?!
Rationally she knew he had promised her nothing. And yet. If only there were, for such sad, finely lined, cellulite-dimpled sacks as herself, a suitable avenue for revenge.
By the late spring, she had more or less accepted that Jonathan was a fever dream and she a naive dater, rusty, gullible, rash. She had deleted their text thread and the mortifying photo from her camera roll, and then permanently expunged it from the folder of Deleteds for good measure. She wished she could expunge the decision to meet Jonathan from her memory.
More in character for Chris was to be rule-bound and by the book and have her ducks in a row, and it nagged at her that her license was awry. What if she wanted to drive in the city again, by herself or with someone who was not a poseur poker player with a fucked taillight he couldn’t be bothered to rectify? Her Pennsylvania license was a small wrongness folded into the mistake that was Jonathan. If she righted it, perhaps the man himself would move all the way into her rearview mirror. On June 4 she took a day of PTO.
The Atlantic Center DMV was booked solid so she traveled to the outpost in Coney Island, housed in an echoey hall reminiscent of a high school gymnasium. Banks of monitors displayed which ticket number was being sent to which counter, but the numbers were tiny and achronological, and the female robot echoing the information on the PA had a lag. The system was meant to text you when it was your turn but the cell service in the building was spotty and Chris’s first summons (after an hour and change) arrived late; by the time she made it to Counter 23 she’d forfeited her spot.
She received a new ticket and circled the hall, choosing a seat near the door where the reception might be better. She toggled on her haptics and kept her eyes tight on her phone. An online Scrabbler named Donkeyfish challenged her to a match. Good! The reception was sufficient to let the request wriggle through like a strong spermatozoon.
But odd, too, since her name and avatar (ChrisT, armadillo) were not, so far as she knew, accessible to the world at large. She checked her settings. Indeed, I agree to share my username and stats with other players so they may challenge me to matches was deselected. Until now, Chris had played the Scrabble alt app TripleWord exclusively with her sister, who lived in Oregon and was aces, winning seven games to Chris’s every one.
Donkeyfish was a glitch in the matrix. Well, why not? She was already trapped in a glitchy matrix for the foreseeable . . . minutes to hours, who knew.
Chris opened the board. Donkeyfish had played SHALOM for twenty-six points. Chris played HACEK for twenty. Donkeyfish played JACKPOT for forty-four points. Chris played IFTAR for eighteen points. Donkeyfish played SLALOM for seventeen.
A text from the DMV gods pulsed in her palm. Maybe they’d felt sorry for her after her mishap, and fast-tracked her. At Counter 14, she presented a sheaf of documents deemed insufficient, they needed her Social Security card. Yes, the physical one. No, her W-2 wouldn’t work in its stead. Yes, that requirement was listed on the website. She should make a new appointment and have a good day now.
Waiting for the F train—overland out there, the ocean’s tang carrying in the breeze—she played FUTILITY for seventy-one points. In the game’s chat window, Donkeyfish sent two emojis: a bullseye and the salute face, whose raised hand always looked to Chris like a tuber or a penis.
At home she stroked the cat’s spine and poured herself a glass of rosé at 4 p.m. She beat Donkeyfish 321–284 and they began a new game. His rapid-fire ripostes made her imagine that he too was playing hooky to give his whole attention to the match at hand. He played KILIM for thirty-eight points. She played CUFFED for twenty-six. He played OVA for thirteen. She played HORIZON for ninety-one. Then he played MAMIE (for thirty-six points) and it clawed through the pleasant haze the wine had imparted. Bizarre that the word was even valid. She’d have thought it was a proper noun, but it was also, per the Scrabble dictionary, an alternate spelling for “mamey,” a tropical tree that bore red fruit.
A humid sensation settled around her ears and neck, as if she were being observed from behind a two-way mirror. She played HA (ten points) just to play something, to shunt him a turn so she could see what he did next. FROGGING (seventy-eight points). The humid feeling around her ears got thicker. In the winter, she’d had to undo a big section of the dreamcatcher due to poor tension, and at Rao’s she’d told Jonathan about that frustration, taking out the piece she carried everywhere to illustrate the swath of wasted work, and he had asked her what she’d just called it, when you ripped out all those stitches, and she repeated the term, and he said, “Love it. Ribbit.”
She played HM for six. He played CERUMEN for twenty-six. A word she knew thanks to Eric, it was the medical term for earwax. She played FEN for twelve. He played ROSE for four. He could have used the S to pluralize her HORIZON and put SORE for nineteen additional points, but why play to win when Rose was the name of the protagonist in Chris’s novel-in-progress?
She recoiled from the phone and tossed it onto the couch, where it bounced and fell facedown. She retrieved it and opened her previous game with Donkeyfish to parse his plays in the order he’d dealt them. SHALOM—well hello again. On the West Side Highway they’d woven between stoppered cars, then moving ones, like slaloming skiers. KILIM she had to look up, and it was a rug like the rugs in that coffee shop. CURB, for when she’d parked his car on 113th and gotten out to check that she was close enough, within twelve inches. ZITI, she’d ordered them baked at the restaurant. The suite went beyond coincidence. What red herrings there were had to be clues that were coyer, more oblique. What did HATPIN signify? And IGNEOUS—had he put that down to suggest that what was briefly molten between them had gone coarsely cold?
Black and white, plain as day, was OVA, her sorest spot, and he had gone ahead and poked the beehive. And then ROSE, her treasured heroine half-formed, in chrysalis, a guttering candle he could snuff, a shimmering soap bubble he could puncture. A word came into her head, a word her serially dating friends used willy-nilly for love interests of callous comportment—Jonathan-as-Donkeyfish must be a sociopath. He’d played—was playing—Chris for a fool; he was taunting her.
She started a text to her sister—remember that guy I went out with, the young one with the car who ghosted, is there a way he could have sought me out on TripleWord?—but it sounded mad and desperate, and she abandoned it.
She glugged three long sips of rosé from the bottle. He had underestimated the fight in her, her capacity to fuck with him right back. In the chat, she sent him the hatching chick emoji and the bouquet emoji.
Haha, replied Donkeyfish.
JACKPOT!!! Chris wrote.
Donkeyfish sent a question mark.
Her fingers flew as if possessed. I thought I was infertile, turns out, not so much. Seems your pullout game is weak. I will sue you for child support and take you to the cleaners. She dragged the cursor back to I will sue you to insert a superstitious If I carry to term for this fictitious baby who was of course an empty threat but whatever, she liked the thought of him looking over his shoulder for the rest of his life. She went on about how you can’t just treat a person like a used condom and how dare he take Rose’s name in vain—so what if he thought she was unhinged, she would teach him a lesson while she had his attention—but just as she was about to tap the dart-like arrow and rock his dumb little world, their chat vanished. Donkeyfish had unmatched her, poof, his denouement one more disappearing act. Coward.
When Chris came to the next morning, she was muzzy with hangover and yesterday’s opponent was consequently blurrier. Whether he had or hadn’t been her nasty one-night stand seemed less urgent, and she was not about to recreate her prank and send it by carrier pigeon to a hit-or-miss roof on East 26th Street.
Five months later, she was going steady with a man named Lester. He was pretty great, actually. Thirty-eight, a professor of statistics at Columbia, no kids, he read books and baked bread and sent good memes, they Citi-Biked through Central Park, they went to Marvel movies, he’d introduced her to his mom, she’d shown him a draft of ABoSR’s first three chapters and his notes were meticulous and spot-on. They’d agreed it was a little too soon to do Thanksgiving together so Chris was on a packed Tuesday train to Merion Station to be with her parents and sister. She was browsing the Times when she came upon a picture of Jonathan, only his name was James Scarpetta and he’d been arrested on charges of bribery, wire fraud, and money laundering as an alleged fixer in a point-shaving scheme that had female college gymnasts throwing their meets for payments of up to $30k.
She turned the proverbial page, and read an article about mitochondrial replacement therapy for oocytes in Tirana, Albania instead. Lester had made a murmur about wanting to coach Little League someday. She was already forty-one but also only forty-one—who knew what life held? Anything was possible.
