What I gave birth to wasn’t a baby. It was a baby’s scream. I felt it— the scream— as it passed through my body in a bloody track, leaving wounds for the doctors to stitch. I heard the scream as it hit the air and it continued screaming for hours after that. The midwife told me that the screaming had stopped in only a few minutes. They’d tried to resuscitate, she’d said, but they’d failed.

She lied.

I could still hear the scream down the hall, calling to me, begging me not to let them take it to the incinerator.

I remember the agony in the folds of my privates as I escaped the hospital with the scream screaming inside the duffle bag. The call went out to law enforcement nationwide: Arkansas woman, 37, stabbed nurse in throat, absconded with dead baby, approach with maximum caution.

Another lie.

I stabbed the nurse. That’s true. But I never absconded with a dead baby. I absconded with a baby’s scream. The rest of the tissue surrounding the scream— the eyes, the nose, the lips, the arms and legs— was all just a synthetic case that the hospital or the government had made to contain the scream. My real baby had been born unlike any other: given birth to across the country in a thousand locations and I was the only one who could put him back together again.

In January I found my baby’s eyes in a Walmart in Fort Worth. The body through which they had passed— the one that thought it was their mother— was pushing them in a cart. It only took the slightest misdirection— setting off the fire alarm— and I was able to get the piece of wetware out of the booster seat, out of the store, and into the pickup truck.

We lived together for weeks: Me and my baby’s eyes, shining green inside that robot body. The scream had begun to rot by this point so it was the perfect time. I peeled off the skin and cut away the muscle from the scream like it was a rotisserie chicken. I used the food processor to blend and blend again until the scream— still screaming— was nothing but a red paste. I fed my baby’s scream to my baby’s eyes. My baby’s eyes ate my baby’s scream, gurgling and laughing.

Now the synthetic thing I carry with me in the pickup is more alive than before. Mostly it’s still an automaton but at least its scream and its eyes are real. Yesterday we drove clean out of Texas, through Oklahoma, and into Colorado. We arrived in Trinidad just after dinnertime and we’ve been driving around residential plots for hours. My baby’s scream is quiet, so not to draw attention. My baby’s eyes look out just as I look out.

Just a moment ago we saw the shape of a baby through a house window. We all know its lips are my baby’s lips.