I dream I’m making tender love with an owl. The next morning, I see talon marks across my chest that trace the path of my owl-lover’s embrace. Two weeks later I learn that I’m pregnant.

You may wonder: How could such a thing come to pass between woman and owl?

I, too, am astounded because my owl-lover was a woman.

As for you, owl-baby, let’s lay out the facts. Your owlness is with you from the very beginning. It’s there when a first cell becomes two, four, eight. It’s there when you sleep too much, and crawl too late, and when you bite when you aren’t supposed to bite, and shriek when you aren’t supposed to shriek; and on the day that you are born — on the day when I first look down on your pinched-red, tiny-clawed, outraged little body lying naked and intubated in a box — I won’t have the slightest idea about who you are, or what I will become.

But there you will be, and you will be of me.

We’re in the kitchen in our Sacramento home when I tell my husband I’m pregnant. I don’t even mean to say the words. My stew is simmering on the stove and its vapors tint the air the color of dog-skin and I can barely see the truth of things. My husband is leaning on the counter with a beer in hand, and he’s been telling me about his day, in his usual upbeat tone, while punctuating his words with dazzling flashes of rational thinking.

“I’m pregnant,” I say.

I’m afraid to look him in the eye. I look at the floor instead. I notice the floor could use a good mopping. I start to think about mops and the way they never get anything truly clean. Next I think about the way housekeeping is nothing more than a losing encounter with entropy. Did my husband hear what I said? Is it even true? Can I take it back?

And then my husband is hugging me, not gently but commandingly, and you could even say triumphantly. He is 11 inches taller and outweighs me by 97 pounds. My feet come right up off the floor as he spins me around. When he sets me back down, I hear Arvo Pärt’s plaintive duet for violin and piano, Spiegel im Spiegel, playing in my head, with all of its steady inevitability and sadness, and my life flows forward.

My husband says: “Hell. Wow. Oh. Hell. We’ve been waiting for this baby for so long!”

“Wait a minute,” I say. “I have not been waiting for this baby for so long. That is false. I’m not sure I want this baby at all.”

My husband isn’t listening. He spins me around some more until I get carried along by his mood, and the next thing I know the two of us are cavorting with joy in our somewhat grimy kitchen while we let the stew burn. Once the spinning is over and my feet are back on the ground, I’m left with a dizzying sense of loss. It happens like clockwork, they say. An owl-baby is born. This baby will never learn to speak, or love, or look after itself. It will never learn to read or toss a football. The father can see no single thing in this child that reminds him of himself. He thinks: “This isn’t fair to me.” And then he leaves. The mother stays.

“Come back, come back from wherever you are,” my husband says.

I can tell time has passed because the dishes are dirty and my stomach is full and my husband is scooping the leftover stew into a plastic container. He is chattering away about becoming a father, a topic that leads him straight into telling me stories about his boyhood, and how his boyhood years shaped the man he is today. And then he tells me all about the future, and about what a good father he is going to be; and after that he swoops me up and carries me to our bedroom, where he makes love to me until I feel cherished and protected, and as precious as a glass figurine in need of constant dusting.

After our lovemaking my husband goes straight to sleep, leaving me alone and wide awake in the dark. I’m in mourning for my uncomplicated past, before I became pregnant with an owl-baby. I’m thinking about my music. I’m thinking about my owl-lover. I’m thinking about my life. I try to imagine adding an owl-baby to the mix. I’m a professional musician, a cellist, and I love my work. My pregnancy hasn’t changed that yet. Maybe I can take the owl-baby along when I tour. Maybe I can give cello lessons while the owl-baby is gently napping. The owl-baby isn’t buying it. My mind is flooded with broody owl-baby objections to my plans. It’s trying to replace my selfish doubts with its own, yearning wonder about the life to come, outside the womb, if only I agree to be its mother. By morning I’m exhausted by the owl-baby’s pleas. When my husband finally opens his eyes, I’m looking straight into them. All night long I’ve been waiting for him to wake up and take my side. All night long the whip-poor-wills and chuck-will’s-widows have been screaming out their cold judgments of me from their tiny, brittle mouths, complaining about my lack of commitment so hatefully that I can’t believe my husband slept through their rancor.

“Help me,” I try to say, now that my husband’s eyes are finally open.

But the owl-baby bites my tongue.

Just before my husband opened his eyes, I could still imagine that he had all the answers. Now that he is awake he looks stupefied. He yawns broadly and then he chews on his inner cheek. Soon his face breaks into a thousand smiles because he just remembered my delicate condition. He kisses me on the lips, eyelids, hair; and then he leaps up and volunteers to make us breakfast. He makes the coffee strong. He is doing his best to make me feel honored, and I do feel honored, like a sacrificial goat feels honored. Now we’re munching toast together in the kitchen. My husband is an intellectual property lawyer in the patented-seed field, and he is already dressed for the job, in a starched-white shirt and trousers that he pressed himself. I’m still in my bathrobe. Our kitchen is one of those retro, rose-colored kitchens. The refrigerator is pink. The floor is black-and-white squares. The walls are the color of cleaned-up blood. The window looks out on a jaundice-yellow yard because I always forget to water the plants. The dishes from the night before are still in the sink. Soon there will be breakfast dishes to add to the pile. My kitchen and my world are spinning in all the wrong directions and I feel sick. My husband has just stopped reading the news on his phone because just now I got the words out past my lips that I’ve been wanting to say to him all morning, which are: “Help me.”

There, it’s done. I’ve said it. The world rights itself.

He reaches across the table and grabs my hands.

“What is it?” he says. “What’s on your mind? I love you. I’m here to help.”

“You think this baby is going to be like you, but it’s not like you at all,” I say. “This baby is an owl-baby.”

“Oh, honey, honey, honey,” my husband says. “That’s the jitters talking. Don’t listen. I’m here for you. I love you.”

Time passes and passes until finally we both cry a little. “Maybe you’re right. Maybe it’s just the jitters,” I say.

“Maybe it’s just the hormones,” he says. “We’re in this together. I love you. You’re having a feeling, that’s all. We can talk more later.”

He kisses the top of my head. He’s already thinking about his workday. He kisses me again, this time on the lips, and then he goes out of the room briskly.

I hear a toilet flush.

I hear him whistling down the hall as if everything is settled.

I hear the front door open and close.

His car starts and I hear him drive away.

Now that my husband has left for the day, the owl-baby begins in earnest to attach itself and burrow in. I do my best to resist its insistent excavations. I’m determined to follow my usual routine. I teach three cello lessons in my home studio before noon. In the afternoon I work diligently on my transposition of Tom Johnson’s Failing: A Very Difficult Piece for String Bass. I manage to focus so deeply on the work that I stop thinking about my pregnancy altogether, until my husband comes home an hour early, carrying a dozen roses. He observes aloud that I’ve neglected to make dinner, and then he says, in a jolly tone: “Never mind, honey, let’s order takeout.”

He phones in the order himself. Food arrives in tiny cartons. We eat without talking.

After we’re done, we pile the remains in the sink on top of the dishes already there, and my husband suggests we play a few rounds of gin rummy.

And now he is deliberately losing, making clumsy mistakes.

He pretends to enjoy the game. He congratulates me after each play.

He’s shuffling the cards for the next deal. “It’s an owl-baby,” I say.

“Honey,” my husband says. “Don’t do this to yourself. Don’t revisit the past. You’re stronger than you know.”

Lately my husband and I have fallen into the gentle habit of playing gin rummy together just after dinner. I love to watch him shuffle the cards. I love the way he can fit himself into the world so rightly. He’s like a card in the deck that he has just squared up. I’m more like a card that somebody left out in the rain. I try to imagine that my husband’s viewpoint may be completely right when it comes to this owl-baby. I try, at least, to nod my head and smile when he tells me how much he is going to love this baby, and what a good father he’ll be. No good. I hear my own voice say: “You think it’s a dog-baby, but you’re mistaken.”

“Don’t indulge in those feelings, honey,” he says. “It’s not good for you. It’s not good for the baby. It’s been years since you’ve talked this way. You know it’s all a fairy tale. Don’t you?”

“This baby is an owl-baby. If I have this baby, it’s going to kill me.”

“Stop being so dramatic,” my husband says. His voice is tight. He’s getting impatient with me. “We’re going to love this baby,” he says. “I love this baby already.”

“If I don’t get rid of this baby, I’ll die.”

“Owl-baby! Dog-baby! Killer-baby! Baby-killer!” my husband shouts and slams his fist down on the table.

Right away he apologizes.

“I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” he says. “Oh, God, I’m sorry.”

He gathers the cards together and begins to shuffle them in a performatively casual manner, and then he decides it would be best to apologize to me a few more times.

“I’m sorry. I really am. Oh, gosh. Of course, you’re afraid. Of course, you’re full of doubt. There’s a new little person growing inside you. We’ve taken the leap. We’ve never been parents before and we don’t know what to expect. Who wouldn’t be afraid?”

“Listen to me,” I say.

“Life can be scary sometimes. I get it. I do. I’m listening. I love you.”

“It’s a mistake. It’s not even yours. Its other-mother is an owl.”

My husband, who hates everything that he can’t solve in an instant, and who just moments ago had been shuffling the cards on our kitchen table in a contemplative manner, hurls the entire deck of cards across the room. The cards thump on the wall and scatter explosively, landing on the counters, and the floor, and in the sink where the dishes are soaking in bilious water.

My husband walks away.

That’s the end of the game.

After the card-throwing incident I avoid my husband for the rest of the night. I wait until he’s completely asleep before I creep into bed next to him. As I lie here, listening to his gentle aspirations, I keep trying to inject myself with optimistic messages about the future. I try for hours, but it’s hard to complete a single rational thought because the owl-baby is busy-busy interrupting each thought with chaotic and mysterious chitterings of its own, until the noise in my head grows so confused that I’m sure I’ll never sleep again.

It turns out I’m wrong about not sleeping again, though, because the next thing I know I’m startled awake by a harsh daylight shining in from a little window near my bed.

My husband’s side of the bed is empty. It looks to be late morning.

Falling back to sleep is out of the question, and I decide to go out for a little walk. Outside, a bright sun beats and the air is filled with the cries of mourning doves. I walk along until I come across a woman who is painting daisies on her mailbox. The woman doesn’t pay any attention to me. There is a little dog running about in the woman’s yard, one of those high-strung, boisterous little dogs. It has a red rubber ball in its mouth. The dog and I lock eyes as I pass by. Almost as if an unspoken promise has been exchanged, the dog begins to follow me. To discourage the dog I cross to the other side of the street, but the dog still doggedly follows, trotting right along at my heel, stopping when I stop and speeding up when I speed up.

“Excuse me?” I call over to the woman painting daisies on her mailbox. “Can you call your dog, please?”

The daisy-painting woman doesn’t look up. She’s absorbed in her creative work.

Meanwhile the dog drops its little red ball between my feet and wags its tail.

Full of good intention, I pick up the grotesquely clammy ball and lob it gently in the direction of the dog’s home. The dog skitters after it. I think I’ve solved my dog problem in a very clever way until a car comes around a corner and runs the dog right over. The dog doesn’t even have time to complain about its fate before it’s dead and gone. The car is one of those giant Cadillacs from bygone days and its springs are all shot and maybe that’s why the driver doesn’t notice such a small bump as this dog, because the driver keeps going. And the woman goes on painting. And I could go on walking. It’s not really my fault. But I find myself crossing back over the street, where I stand, stupidly, until the woman notices me.

“What do you want?” the woman says.

“I’m sorry, but your dog has been hit by a car.”

I try to say it gently. I gesture in the dead dog’s direction.

The other woman’s face fills up with rancid emotion, and her skin emits small sparks.

“That’s not my dog,” the woman says. “I hate that dog. That dog shits on my lawn all day. I don’t even keep a dog. Wait a minute. I don’t even think that is a dog. That’s just some crap in the road. What are you up to? Aren’t you the one who keeps stealing aluminum cans from my recycling box? You are! You goddamn people!”

She jabs me in the chest.

“If I ever see you on my property again, I’ll get my gun,” she says. “Now git!”

Once I’m home from my walk, I throw on a jacket and find my keys and back my little car out and drive off. I don’t have an appointment, but I like to think that the women where I’m going will be ready for someone like me to show up at their door. The building is low-slung and brick-faced, and the parking lot is full. I need to park across the street, and after that I need to walk past the people holding placards of aborted fetal remains enlarged to the size of four-year-olds. The maple trees that line the street are filled with crows. They’re looking down on me, and judging me, but I’m immune to their shallow accusations. The waiting room is filled with pregnant teens holding hands with their best girlfriends. We respect one another’s privacy by not looking one another in the eye. When a kindly-looking woman wearing a hand-crocheted cardigan calls my name, I follow her into a small cubicle and I tell her my story. I tell her everything. I tell her about my owl-lover — my dear, fierce tender-woman — and I tell her that the baby inside me is an owl-baby. I hate the sound of my voice because it’s filled with a pathetic tremor. This woman passes no judgment over me. Her lack of judgment is so complete that she is useless to me. I’m irked that she won’t take a stand. I long for her to take my hands in hers or to enfold me in a mother-hug and to say, “Of course you must get rid of it.” She says nothing of the kind. Her detachment is a kind of torture. Tears spring from my eyes.

The kindly-looking woman in the cardigan hands me a box of tissues.

“No one can make this decision for you, hon,” she says. “You take your time now, and cry all you like. Have a good little cry, dear. If you decide to go ahead, then let us know. Here is my card.”

She puts her card on the table. She taps it twice. She steps out and closes the door so I can have my good little cry in privacy.

Now that we’re alone together, the owl-baby gets busy-busy whispering in my ear, trying to convince me to give up. It tells me it’s prepared to use force, but would prefer my full cooperation. I pray for a miscarriage.

As I’m driving back home from the clinic, I’m feeling so agitated and undisciplined that a painful memory from my childhood forces its way into my head — of the day when my father took me to the zoo.

We lived in a town that people used to call, with affection, a “sleepy one-horse town,” until a rare ore was found in the hills and our “sleepy one-horse town” became a burgeoning city overnight. By the time I was born, there were piles of burning industrial waste encircling the perimeter of the city, and the air was turgid with smoke and soot, and the population had grown so large and so fast that the town had split into warring neighborhoods. My father told me that there were good neighborhoods, where the streets were straight and clean and well lit, and where the people doggedly followed the law; and there were bad neighborhoods, where streets were dirty and narrow, and crowded with hucksters and homeless degenerates, and where the people lived like wild animals. Between neighborhoods lay a border, where the gleaming met the gloaming. I lived with my parents quite close to the border, in a putty-colored house. If I looked out the front window, I could see a world that was ordered correctly along right angles, and if I looked out the back window, I could see wild eyes staring out at me from a shimmering, tangled thicket.

My mother suffered from chronic ornithosis, a disease of the skin that made her shy about going out and that left her bereft of friends and female companionship. I knew that she loved me, but I was never really sure if what I felt for her in return was love or just a brittle sort of pity. Her face was always hangdog, and I disliked the feeling of her corrugated diseased skin scraping against my soft skin when she held me.

My father, on the other hand, was gregarious and handsome. Every night he and his friends would gather around the hearth to smoke cigars and to share their bitter views about the world, until smoke curled into every corner of the house, and came wafting out from the cupboards when we opened them the next morning. My mother wasn’t allowed to enter the room where these men gathered, unless it was to serve them food or to empty the ashtrays, but I was always made welcome. In those days I was a very pretty girl, and small for my age, almost like a tiny doll, and my father enjoyed dressing me up and making me do tricks for his friends. If his friends liked my tricks, then my father would reward me with little cakes. His friends would smile and bare their brown teeth, and pinch my cheek with their tobacco-yellowed fingers, so hard that I would bruise. Sometimes a man with big meaty shoulders might say to me: “I could just eat you right up, you pretty little thing! Wouldn’t you like me to eat you right up?” And I would say: “Why, no, Mr. Meaty, I would like you to keep your hands off of me, please.” My father would be ready to paddle me for my impertinence, but then he’d notice the way my brave, futile speech had made his friends all laugh, and he would feed me another little cake instead.

“Pretty little thing,” the men would say.

“Pretty, yes, but stupid,” my father would say brusquely, and then he’d send me from the room, and my mother, who had been listening from behind a door, would take me into her rough arms and tell me that she was proud of me, and that I shouldn’t pay any mind to what my father said about me.

A day came along — the day that I’m remembering now — when my father took me to the zoo. The zoo in our town was poor and broken, and its prize animal, a giant Strix, was kept in a cage so small that the creature couldn’t stand up properly. The creature kept looking at me through the bars, and it seemed to me that it was trying desperately to tell me something — that the two of us were the same, this Strix and I: that we were both sad, wild, perfect things.

“That’s what you’ll grow up to be, Tiny-girl, if you don’t learn to obey me,” my father said. “You’ll be a wild thing that belongs in a cage. You behave like a wild animal already. You take after your mother.”

The creature looked so sad to me. It licked its skin and so did I. It began to howl, and I, to scream. My father tried to pull me away, but I resisted. I scratched and bit. Soon the zookeeper came running. He had seen this kind of behavior before and came prepared, brandishing his paddle and swatting me several times before I fell silent and collapsed. My father carried me home and took me into a room without a lamp. “I’m going to fix you good,” he said, and began to paddle me just as relentlessly as the zookeeper had paddled me. And although my mother was meek by nature, and typically did what she was told by my father, that night she flew to my side and defended me, so ferociously that my father fell to the ground, his mouth and eyes trapped in a permanent rictus of surprise. Then my mother snatched me up and fled with me straight into the gloaming, with only the blood-red moon to guide us. At first she was so agitated that she found the strength to carry me along in her arms as we ran, and when I grew too heavy for her to carry, she held me by the hand and pulled me along, so fast that my feet barely touched the ground; but as her excitement waned, and her stamina gave out, our pace grew slower and more labored. Soon her steps grew so slow and heavy that it felt to me as if my mother’s feet must be sinking into the ground with each step. It took all my strength to pull her out again and to drag her forward. Her hand, dry and scaled from her chronic ornithosis, began to feel like a wooden claw.

“Ma, come on!” I whispered. She let go of my hand. “Ma?” I said.

My mother didn’t answer. She gestured mutely toward her feet. Is it true that her long toes were burying themselves in the ground, so deeply that she could no longer take a step? Do I honestly remember seeing her two feet rooting themselves to the spot? Did her skin really become hard and rough all over, like a tree? Were there really spring-green leaves spilling forth from her fingertips? Or has my adult mind painted the memory of this night in such unlikely colors as a way to assuage my guilt for leaving her? I could hear men shouting and dogs barking, coming closer. Ahead I could see the tangled thicket. The wind in the trees sounded like the voices of women singing in chorus, and their voices were filled with glottal embellishments, as if sung by throats made of wood. The music urged me forward. And so I left my mother, and went on without her. I wasn’t afraid because the trees took care of me, and brooded and bent over me, and sang to me their melancholy songs, and fed me, and gave me succor, until the Bird of the Wood found me and took me home with her and taught me to trust the sound of my own voice.

But now I can’t understand why such a strange story should come flooding over my thoughts just as I’m driving home from the clinic in my little car. I’m so overcome by my own memories that I need to pull over and park, and I spend the next several minutes practicing my breathing exercises, while listening to the lovely cold relentless beauty of Cantus Arcticus by Rautavaara, a recording of which I always keep in my car, for times such as these.

From Chouette by Claire Oshetsky. Copyright 2021 Claire Oshetsky. Excerpted by permission of Ecco, an imprint of HarperCollins.