Sara Quinn Rivara
LEDA AFTER THE SWAN
I bought a pregnancy test at the party store near the river where a man was found floating face down, and before the ambulance arrived I touched his skin, cold and pink as the tile of the Elks Lodge bathroom where afterwards I stopped to pee. The bar was full. There were bushtits in the cedar that rasped its branches against the bathroom window, cigarette smoke fuzzed the walls like moss. When I walked past the men at the bar, one of them slipped his hand up my skirt and called me sweetie; another whistled at me like a bird. My throat swelled shut. A bushtit makes a nest out of moss, lichen, strands of human hair, then abandons it after the eggs are hatched. A pregnancy test takes three minutes. I reapplied my mascara, bit my lips till they bled. The sky pinked, drained into the river. A small pink cross appeared, faint and tremulous, on the plastic test. The door squeaked on its hinge as it swung shut. At the bar, a man put his hand on my leg. I let him. I know you have stories about women like me.