The following is an except from the script of body fail body, written by Yoni Tamang:

Scene: Letter to the Baby

[Lights dim. A desk under a single lamp. The Secretary writes slowly, deliberately. Her voice enters as voiceover, soft but insistent.]

THE SECRETARY (V.O.):
As I walked in the vortex the cold stung the skin between my thighs. The man with his flowers, wrapped in plastic, trotted past in shorts and I wondered: who will die first, me or the begonias? A high rise loomed above, its summit lost in snow. He fluttered for the fob, lifted it to the keypad. A rush. A beep.

My fingers, like the city, turning white, remembered the empty lot speckled with glass and cups where I felt you, finally, inside me. The weight of brick and steel pinned that past to a patch of soil. We are sinking, entombed. He knocked the slush from his sneakers. The door, wedged ajar with ice, exhaled, and in its curling breath I stood.

What would I say if you existed? How does one speak to a cipher? Each morning I walk to the train and stare into the indigo horizon. Can I wish you into flesh? Where is the necromancer’s whisper? What part of me would I sever to know an unlived future? Shouldn’t hope be easier to express than breast milk?

You are a ghost I cannot feed. Miles of hunger stretch before me. Here we are, trapped in this tundra together. Meet me at the edge of myself and I will bring a ziplock bag of baby carrots and cereal, a juice box you will struggle to puncture. Your head, a straw pressed through, my body, a sheet of cellophane.

What I had, I can no longer feel. Frostbitten to the old ways, I watch them fall like petals. I’ll become you, hot and wet, inside me, emerging, blooming. My body remembers, and will not let me forget.

[Voice trails off. The Secretary’s pen stops. She sets it down deliberately. Silence. A low hum builds. From the shadows, the monster swells into view behind her. The Secretary looks up briefly, nonplussed, then lowers her eyes. The baby is born of the monster.]