By Khadija Rehman

She had been reading Wuthering Heights again, her seventh time, as if everyone spent their evenings inside Ovid or Nabokov. She was curled on the bed, knees close to the chest, not in sorrow but in thought, which, for her, was sometimes the same thing.  

He was half-listening from the other end of the room. He was focused on carbon ratios and lattice defects and the heat signatures of metals—work that never loved him back, but never asked much either.

She said absently, “I was thinking today… what if I laid an egg?”

He looked up. “What?”

“Like, an actual egg. The size of a hen’s. Not poetic, not metaphorical. Real.”

He laughed, finally swivelling his chair toward her. “You’re ridiculous. What’s going on in that little head of yours?”

She didn’t answer immediately. She sat up a little, her arms folding around her shins.

“I mean—what if that’s how it worked? What if, for a woman to lay that egg, she had to be truly in love with a man? And the man had to be in love with her. Not in the way people throw around the word, but like Achilles and Patroclus. You know?”

He watched her now. Not laughing.

“And if they’re not really in love,” she continued, “her body wouldn’t make the egg. It just wouldn’t happen. Biology would know.”

“You mean like a system of checks and balances,” he offered.

“Yes,” she said. “But governed by sincerity.”

“Interesting protocol,” he muttered, clicking his pen shut. “But when does one know they love someone?”

He shook his head almost immediately. “Stupid question. Don’t answer that.”

“I know the answer,” she said, eyes still on the ceiling. “It’s fairly simple.”

He turned toward her. “When is it then?”

“When you feel kindness for them,” she said. “Ridiculous amounts of kindness.”

He let out a small laugh, startled. “That is such a great answer.”

She looked at him then, eyes quiet but bright. “Do you know when to know for sure you’re being loved honestly?”

He leaned in. “When?”

“When you begin to feel kinder toward yourself,” she said. “They teach you a gentler way to say your own name.”

He gasped.

And then he was very still.

She added to the entire blueprint of love: “Also, mutual kindness must override mutual hostility. That’s it.”

She moved closer to the edge of the bed.

“So,” she went on, “let’s say the woman lays this egg. And it’s small. Very fragile. She gives it to the man, the father. And it becomes his job to carry it. All the time. Skin to shell. For nine months.”

He raised a brow but said nothing.

“And during that time, it would need more than just touch. It would need a kind of… nourishing love. A constant love. Not performative, not out of duty. Something cellular. The kind that changes you chemically. Do you know,” she added, turning her head to look at him, “when we long for something, like really long for it, our body releases dopamine. Oxytocin. Sometimes even serotonin. Wanting is its own biological event.”

He didn’t interrupt.

“So I think,” she said, slower now, “that if the man truly loves the child inside that egg… if he wants her so much that his body starts to change, then maybe the egg begins to grow. Bit by bit. Until one day, it’s no longer a tiny thing but a full, human-sized shell. And it hatches.”

She drew in a breath.

“And the baby that comes out… she will know. She will know that she was loved into existence. That she wasn’t an accident or a byproduct of lust or boredom. But that she was wanted. She was willed.”

He looked down at his hands now. His screen dimmed behind him.

“She would never have to wonder if she was a mistake. She’d never flinch at the word bastard, because the world would forget that word even existed. It would be impossible to be born without love.”

There was a long pause.

Then he said, quietly, “What if humans really evolved that way?”

She tilted her head, a tired kind of smile just beginning around her mouth. “Then each of us would know… someone once loved us enough to give us life.”

He got up, walked to her, and sat beside her without touching.

“I’ll love you for a very long time, okay?” he said.

“Okay.”

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Khadija Rehman (she/her) is an Indian writer who was selected for the 2021 International Writing Program at the University of Iowa. Her work has appeared in the IWP anthologies Crosswalks and The Heartworm, and is forthcoming in Eunoia Review. She often writes about love, violence, longing, and despair.