By S.J. Powers
She had a birthday, became thirty, became morbid and suffering and told her lover she would bear no children, that inherent in birth is the sentence of death, that all childbearing is selfish, an illusion of immortality and how well she knew that she would die soon ( what is forty, fifty more years compared to eternity? ) , that she was powerless, that her only life was moving along a path she could not remember freely choosing, and she would not know all experience, live all the lives, reach all the corners that she might, but if nothing else, she said, she wished better for her unborn offspring than this anguish, this knowledge of nothingness-after-life.
Take an aspirin, her lover said. Not unkindly.
S. J. Powers has a dazzling array of publishing credits. She lives with her partner and their two cats in a suburb outside of Chicago.