SmokeLong Quarterly

If the baby is dead, its name has no consequence. Name the baby some mix of references to your childhood favorites: Zelda Ozma, Legolas Almanzo, Lucas Leia. You can mix genders. The baby is dead; there is no consequence of gender. Name the baby after your favorite animal: Peregrine Falcon. Pippin for short, refer to the baby only as Pippin. Pippin will never care; Pippin is dead and will never have to decide between telling schoolmates that the name comes from a bird of prey or telling them it’s from a hobbit. Or you could try a play on words! Ada Clementine. Ate a clementine. Both of your grandmothers’ names, unusable otherwise. You know that Clementine means mercy and Ada means noble: noble mercy. But you can say, “my baby loved clementines!” Which is hilarious, because your baby is dead and never ate a clementine. Will never eat a clementine. Except, in those middle months of the pregnancy, in winter, when you sat by the window and ate bags of clementines, knowing the little movements within you were unnameable.