She examined her hands as she waited for the pharmacist, and they looked ugly to her. This is not normally the case: Terry is attractive enough, no raving beauty, but she has the most extraordinary skin. Fine-pored and golden like an Indian child’s, soft as a cloud. Everyone notices it, most comment on it, many touch it. In fact Terry gets touched a lot. It usually annoys her. But it generally gives her pleasure to look at her own skin. The back of her hand is normally a comfort to her. At that moment, to her fevered eyes, her veins stood out like blue gopher tracks. Her skin looked dehydrated. She took LSD once in college; that’s the only other time her hands looked so ugly.

She paid for her prescriptions without thought and won’t remember that later, but she was deep into metaphysics as she left the pharmacy. Dodging among the shoppers and vendors, the panhandlers and the strollers with strollers, she said to herself that it didn’t matter if you’re an evolutionist or an – ahem! creationist, either way the behest is to be fruitful, multiply, propagate the species. Either way, the behest has been fulfilled. She said to herself that people shouldn’t have babies. Terry didn’t know how to apply that insight but she thought it was probably significant.

She heard a crowd of birds at that moment, and it disoriented her. Usually she saw them when she commuted home; at each end of the Transbay Bus Terminal entrance is a big common pine, and hordes of small dark nondescript birds flock from one tree to the other chattering every dusk. Terry had never noted the loud crowd at any other time. But there they were, gathered in the Market Street foliage, mid-morning on a winter day. Soundalike birds above and lookalike folk below.

She smiled to herself as she thought that, and simultaneously caught the eye of a toddler, in a stroller, to the left and just ahead of her, looking backward. The baby reacted as if Terry were smiling at him; he grinned at her. He was absolutely adorable.

He was being pushed by a young, light black woman. She could be his mother or his care-provider; she looked to be in her late teens. The baby was also light black: amber-toned with curly hair and liquid chocolate eyes. He had sweet nectarine cheeks and he gazed at Terry with unmitigated love. Looking like her baby would have looked.

Terry was mesmerized. She walked a little faster, moved a little closer, smiled again at the baby and was pulled again into the warm orbit of the answering grin. The baby’s mother/caretaker wasn’t paying attention; she pushed that stroller ahead of herself, mindlessly. They were all approaching an intersection, and they had the green light and walking figure. The stroller was the first thing into the street.

But there was one of those City-irked drivers, impatient to make the right turn on red. Looking to the left where other cars would be, never to the right for the pedestrians who had the green.

The driver was starting to accelerate through his right turn, peering only to the left, as the stroller was pushed into the path of the car. Terry’s leap was automatic; before she could articulate her act even to herself, she swooped to the baby and lifted him in the stroller as she tried to spin back out of the car’s way. Her right hip was clipped and she lost the stroller as she went down, but it and the baby landed back on the sidewalk. The baby got a bad jolt and a scrape on the arm.

Terry’s hip, femur, and tibia are broken. Her right leg was so badly abraded that she’s going to need a skin graft. But the little boy is fine. Terry’s in a hospital bed right now, with hypersensitive feverish skin that would be responding to every thread of the boiled sheets if it weren’t for the morphine in her system. As it is, she feels the exquisite sensations but she finds them interesting. She’s waiting for her fever to cool and her bones to knit. She’s pondering how her skin will be harvested from one part of her body and grafted onto the wound area.

She’s almost ready to receive the members of her family. She knows both her mother (aunt) and her aunt (mother) are waiting, and that there’s no way to avoid full disclosure about the abortion. She’s thinking she might try to distract herself by returning to those ideas (true insights, she remembers) about the overpopulation of the planet. But right now, Terry’s laying back on the flat pillow with hot tears tracking down the sides of her face, humbly glad that baby will be okay.