Summary

Dorothy sits in a stall in the library of the university where she teaches. She is in the middle of a several-day miscarriage, and avoids the phone call of her therapist, who did not know that Dorothy was pregnant. Dorothy considers both the experience of the miscarriage, wondering when her body decided to end the pregnancy and wondering what it was called “when a life stopped developing, but didn’t end?” (4). She considers how, over a few weeks, her need to talk about the pregnancy diminished, until the pregnancy ended. “[Dorothy] thought she might keep [the pregnancy secret] forever, so awful was the thought of returning to the beginning of the story, now that she was at its end” (6). Here, the narration reveals that the end of the pregnancy came about in part because Dorothy took a medication, Cytotec. Meanwhile, Dorothy...