The dark is warm, and it moves. Every few seconds something vast draws in and lets go, and the whole world tilts a few degrees and settles. Beneath that runs the drum, slow and enormous, a beat so constant that the body floating inside it has never once known silence.
The body is small. It has been building itself for twenty weeks out of almost nothing: a spine first, then the bead of a heart, then fingers that learned to curl before there was anything to hold. Now a fine down covers its back and shoulders, a waxy film is thickening over the down, and its eyelids are sealed over eyes with nothing yet to look at. The ears are newer. They finished a few weeks ago, and since then the dark has been crowded.
There is the drum. There is the long gurgle that rises from below and to the left whenever the world has been still a while, and the clatter that follows it. There is a voice, higher and nearer than everything else, which arrives through bone as much as through water, and which the body has started, faintly, to expect.
It moves often. It has moved for months, flutters and somersaults, turns made in a room still wide enough to turn in. None of it has reached anyone. The cord runs from its belly to the placenta, fixed along the back wall, and the front wall lies open, thin and taut, a short reach away and closer every day as the body grows into the space.
Tonight the world has gone still. The tilting has slowed to something long and even. The voice has stopped, and in its place comes a sensation the body has never met: a pressure from outside, settling over the front wall, warm and heavy.
Maisie finds the spot by sound. She has been finding it for weeks, since the evening the woman’s belly first began to carry a second rhythm under the first, quick and light, like rain on a gutter heard through a wall. The other cats walk across that belly as though it were a cushion.
She climbs the slope of the woman’s hip slowly, testing each step through her pads, and lowers herself onto the curve where the belly rises highest. Her clouded eye takes in the lamp as a smear of gold and nothing more. Her left ear swivels toward the kitchen, where the refrigerator ticks, then swings back. Her face aims down, at the warmth beneath her.
The woman’s breathing lengthens. Her hand drifts to Maisie’s back and stops there, too heavy with sleep to stroke.
Maisie listens. Under the big slow heart, the small one goes on, fast and bright and private. She has listened to it the way she once listened to the kittens breathing through the crack in the door the first night they came home: patiently, asking nothing of it.
She tucks her paws beneath her chest and waits.
Inside, the body stretches. It does this without deciding to, the way it does everything. The spine uncurls, the hips turn, and one leg, folded against its chest since the room began to crowd, straightens all at once.
The foot meets the front wall. The wall gives a little, then pushes back, and beyond it the warm weight shifts.
For a moment nothing happens. The drum keeps on. The world breathes in, and out.
On the other side, an ear swivels toward the place where the belly jumped, and this time it stays.
Then a new sound begins. It starts lower than the drum, lower than the voice, lower than anything the body has heard, a rumble that passes through the wall and arrives in the small bones of the new ears. It keeps going. It rolls on, steady and close, swelling a little with each breath of the warm weight above, and the body, which has never been answered before, hangs in the dark and feels the whole world purr.