Her regular coffee shop smelled of many things that afternoon: burnt toast, a hippy’s patchouli, fresh coffee, and the new potting soil in the anonymous houseplant perched on the handpainted side table to her left. She was pregnant, and each smell brought on a new wave of nausea, but she couldn’t read at home since her mother had taken up residence there after leaving her father. And now something—humidity, air conditioning, bad luck—had filled the place with flies, which disgusted her even more than the stank of the young hippy. And so she gathered her paperback and the magazine she brought in case she bored of her spy thriller and pulled herself out of the ugly brocade couch. She was not showing, nor would she for probably another month or so, but she could already envision future lumbering exits from deep sofas. She saw herself slowly climbing up or down stairs, hand widely grasping her low back with the other pushing or pulling on the railing. Her sad reverie was broken by the silent buzz of her cell phone, which she knew would be her mother. Week 9: unwanted roommate, unwanted baby, and her world continued to close in more and more tightly.
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