“Breech birth,” my mama said in hushed tones. “She didn’t make it. You don’t hear about these things much anymore, now that we have good hospitals and doctors with clean hands and a code of conduct for dealing with the body. But it surely happens.”

“Sometimes a body don’t want to live,” said Aunt Mary. “And the baby?”

I went to the Memorial Sen Burial Grounds the morning they buried Claire Majors and watched from a distance as they threw clumps of dirt on her periwinkle casket. Even from that safety I heard the clunks. A man was there, holding a discrete bundle. I did not recognize him. He did not cry. I did not cry either, not there, anyway.

“It lived,” my mama said. “A pity, this business of life, how it just keeps going.”

Magdalen Zinky is a writer and theatre artist based in New York City. She holds an MFA in Theatre from Sarah Lawrence College and a BA in Acting from the College of Santa Fe. Her fiction has been published in Red Sky and Knack Magazine. She was the recipient of the 2016 LGBTQ Scholarship for a writing residency with SAFTA in Knoxville, TN. She is a founding member of The Junkyard Theatre Company and a company member of Daughters of Elysium.