The last item in her pile is a VHS tape she’d located at the bottom of her husband’s filing cabinet. It’s not labeled, so she assumes it’s useless. He has a habit of placing white stickers on important items and writing wordy, sometimes poetic (in a junior high school way), descriptions on them. Since childhood he’d nursed a great infatuation with the video camera, producing stack after stack of tapes, each with their own sticker. She often amuses herself by rearranging them into geometric forms, stopping to read what’s written on each one. “Neighborhood barbecue ’02, minute 2:46 features Tubby Theesfeld falling off the trampoline”, “High school prom, please excuse the awful tie”, “View from ambulance ’99 (broken ankle after slipping down the stairs of the gym)”, “The train that runs all night on New Year’s Eve”, “I can’t help but get excited by windy days”.

She’d initially picked up the nameless tape with the intention of dismembering it, but now she stops. She crawls on over to the television, popping the tape inside the VCR and pressing the buttons on the player experimentally in the dim light, until it clicks softly and begins to whirl. Sitting on her haunches, she watches curiously. There’s no sound, not even her husband’s playful cry of “Action!” The image appears one chunk at a time, letting her analyze one bit before slowly producing the next. There’s a column of data on the right hand side, small white numbers followed by units of measurement: centimeters, frames per second, decibels. A triangular shape with a cut-off top, like the skirt of a young girl, appears, and it is only when the white and gray contents of the triangle reveal themselves that she realizes what the tape is.

It’s a copy of the ultrasound. Undoubtedly it must be a copy, since she’d destroyed the original. She had ripped it to shreds and set it alight in a trash can, while he watched from the porch, arms crossed over his chest. The memory of the burning of the ultrasound is clearer in her mind than that of the ultrasound itself. All she can recall is that she’d been in a bad mood the day of the visit, furious with morning sickness and the strange new shape and texture of her body. Her husband had held her sweaty hand but not looked at her, cooing over the screen with a delight that was foreign to her. She couldn’t remember it doing anything of interest. Had it really squirmed like that, distorting the picture, rolling and slipping around in placental fluid, a solid mass deep in her gut, beating and bare? She feels heavier now than she ever did while pregnant.

She removes the tape and, flipping open the cover, puts two fingers on the black magnetic tape. She keeps them there briefly before changing her mind and reaching for the tube of dark lipstick. She considers writing “I’m sorry”, but there’s no one left who would accept her apology. “Baby” sounds too cutesy. In the end she writes nothing. She gets up, the tape under her arm, and washes her face in the sink. Then she picks up all the things she has taken apart and carefully puts them away.

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The fetuses had ranged in age from 11 weeks to 39. The oldest fetus had a name, twelve newly-sown booties and a trust fund. The parents of the youngest were not even aware of its existence, but for days afterward his mother would feel a certain soreness in her belly that she could not attribute to any medical condition.

Some of the mothers, labelled “carriers” in the case filed twelve hours after the emergence of the first twenty incidents, were within prime reproductive age, had salaries well above the poverty line and enjoyed relatively peaceful lives on streets known for aesthetic qualities and family-friendliness. Thirty percent were either much too old, Jeopardy watchers (what is birth control?) or much too young, get lucky girls. Two out of every ten were lactose intolerant. Two out of every ten held decidedly unsavory professions.

Over the course of a week, three thousand four hundred seventy-two females began falling by the wayside, into clumps and cleavers and wells of their own specific construction. A few took it completely in stride, swallowing up the harsh hand of chance with personality and a dab of gumption. Almost all of them told themselves that it didn’t matter, not for a fetus, not for that, not, not at all. Three thousand three hundred wept into toilet paper in the bathroom, fifty-four took up smoking again. One set up a group for grieving, and she would have found three thousand four hundred seventy-two exactly like her, had it not been for that night’s meteorological forecast.

It just so happens that, on Tuesday, six days after the disappearance of three thousand four hundred seventy-two babies, the usual weather man on Channel Four, a slippery-slick man fifteen of the three thousand four hundred seventy-two had once nursed painful crushes on, was replaced by a small, spaghetti-skinny girl in slacks. “Tonight,” she said, peering a little sleepily into the camera, “at eight fifteen, it’s going to start raining children.” She got in a wink before an authoritative arm pulled her off the air.

Not all of the three thousand four hundred seventy-two women, females, carriers, mothers saw the broadcast. Most of them, in fact, didn’t see it until two days later, while they were being individually interviewed for a police report. Upon their first viewing, one thousand seven hundred started sobbing from sheer force of impact. One started sobbing because she owned the exact same slacks the mystery forecaster wore.

In any case, at eight fifteen in the evening, Tuesday, exactly three thousand four hundred seventy-two women found themselves jumping off hospital beds, abandoning ovens, jolting out of mail rooms and going outside, for no real reason. And then, almost through divine intervention (even though nine hundred of them were hardcore atheists), they all stuck their arms out split seconds before, out of nowhere, babies catapulted out of some atmospheric layer, falling with all the force of human beings weighing from five to eleven pounds, crashing in the most perfectly ungainly way possible, but beautifully, beautifully, beautifully, safe and sound and a few suffering from mild infection, into the cradling limbs of three thousand four hundred seventy-two women.

None of the babies were paired with their biological mother. One woman managed to nab two, twins not related to each other by any conceivable bond other than that of simultaneous falling. And yet, no posters were put up and no children were reclaimed. Each mother felt, more strongly than any of them had ever felt before, that she could hold her babe up and know that it was rightful, she and those other three thousand four hundred seventy-one women and three thousand four hundred seventy-one kids, absolutely rightful in the purest sense of the word.

Mr. Tomofumi sticks his head in the crack between the refrigerator and the wall, he cleans the bottoms of the sofa cushions, he carefully paints over the marks left on the doors. He makes a note of all the damage caused to the five rooms, not that he will ever press the former occupants to pay for repairs. He prefers to think of himself as a forgiving individual. After all, he has been luckier than his other landlord friends; his tenants have never been rowdier than the norm, they have never made the upkeep of his apartment particularly difficult. There is only ever a slight discrepancy in their behavior: they often leave things behind. But even this, as his friends tell him, is hardly odd in the business.

By the time he has flipped the cassette, Mr. Tomofumi has arranged the apartment to his liking, and has piled the remains of his customers in a corner of the living room. He enjoys tackling these possessions, fancies himself a doctor of nostalgia, an interpretor of that which is left behind. Afterwards he relays the finds to the landlord crowd: souvenirs from Europe, self-help books, typewriter keys, classic novels. Mr. Tomofumi sometimes encounters something particularly nice, a sheepskin sweater once, and then a collection of coasters in alternating colors. But the just Mr. Tomofumi never keeps these things, though he might want to. Some part of him still claimed by superstition believes these possessions will never belong to him.

Mr. Tomofumi feels a kind of tenderness for the objects, even the few he does not mention to anyone: full photo albums, explicit magazines that even he, at twenty-three, is embarrassed to flip through, and, today, one hundred and forty packs of playing cards in a purple felt bag.

Now, Mr. Tomofumi holds the felt bag filled with playing cards in his arms. He knows how many there are because he has counted them. Most are aged, but a few are new, and bear the logos of hotels, casinos, strip bars. Mr. Tomofumi feels awkward going through the amassed collection; he shudders visibly upon touching the cards, feels reviled somehow, feels disgusted somehow.

Once, Mr. Tomofumi had found a small altar in a bathroom cabinet. There was a picture of a three-year-old girl, surrounded by candles and small mementos of childhood. On another occasion, he had discovered the diary of a sixteen-year-old boy. Five-hundred pages, Mr. Tomofumi remembers, because he had counted them, filled with photographs and poetry, depictions of girls to love, poor doodles of the backs of heads, on the last page: should I tell you now, what’s really brutal?

Mr. Tomofumi thinks back to the last lease he had signed. It is difficult for him to recall clients, this is how little they mean to him. Mr. Tomofumi does not like having any kind of relationship with previous, current or future tenants. He appears to them thrice: with lease papers once, monthly afterwards for rent, and one last time to clean the apartment. He does, however, vaguely remember the pair who had been his last occupants. Boy-girl, in the lanky style of the young. Mr. Tomofumi actually thinks that, “lanky style of the young”, even though he also remembers that the boy had been older than him. This is because Mr. Tomofumi looks out at the world as Mr. Tomofumi, never as Sebastian.

Mr. Tomofumi goes about the house and gathers up his equipment, stacking it in the pail and shutting off the music before returning to the matter of the cards. His is a little hungry, but for now he ignores it. Mr. Tomofumi does not allow external forces other than gravity in his apartment or in his body. He thinks about throwing the cards away or donating them to the Salvation Army, but he does neither of those things. He calls his roommate and asks him to read aloud the new address of the boy-girl from a file in his bedroom. He writes it down on the back of a magazine. Then he slings the felt bag of cards over his shoulder, gripping the pail and radio-cassette in both hands, and locks the door behind him.

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I wrote you an opera once, a sort of perhaps opera, about box jellyfish. It started with your hands are nematocysts, but I did not know what I meant by that. I wrote you letters once, you wrote me letters once, but I got tired, you got tired, didn’t you? We took bikes, but you were the one who turned back.

I am without water, and you are full of it, am I the Cassandra to your Poseidon? CPR doesn’t restart the heart, it only delays termination. Sea turtles eat box jellyfish, but we’ve never seen turtles. CPR only delays termination. When I stood next to you I could hear the chords for my perhaps opera in your pulse. I did not want to go home to an empty mailbox.

Panthalassa speaks untruths I hear, but I am the Cassandra to your Iphigenia. CPR doesn’t restart hearts, especially not nematocyst hearts. Did I do something wrong? I only wanted to cry you a perhaps opera. Sea turtles are immune, but you are silly flesh wired to a killable heart. We took bikes, and I dragged yours home. Rescue boats tied to the wharf, but you cannot make a drowned bird coo, and you cannot love that which has no intention of returning.