Inventory

The night the schedule went up, I stood beneath the fluorescent lights of the breakroom at the chain bookstore where I managed and traced my finger down the grid of names and hours. My shift was highlighted in yellow.

Overnight reset.

Remove the books.

Relocate the fixtures.

Reshelve the books.

Corporate liked clean verbs. They made everything sound orderly. Mechanical. Contained.

I was eleven weeks pregnant.

The pregnancy had been quiet so far, a small private pulse beneath my ribs. I hadn’t told many people. Not the staff. Not the regulars who drifted through the aisles asking for memoirs about survival or cookbooks promising transformation. I carried it like a secret bookmark tucked between chapters.

The morning the reset began, I woke to a dull ache low in my belly. By afternoon, the ache sharpened. By evening, when the sky had bruised into purple, I knew.

There is a particular stillness that settles in your body when something is ending and you are powerless to stop it. It is not dramatic. It is administrative.

I called no one.

I put on my name badge.

I reported to work.

The staff clocked in at 9:00 p.m. We wheeled out metal carts and began stripping the shelves. Hardcovers thudded into stacks. Paperbacks slid against one another with soft friction. We removed the books. We relocated the fixtures. We reshelved the books.

Somewhere between Fiction and Biography, I felt warmth spreading.

I moved a display table three feet to the left.

I felt the blood.

I kept working.

Retail teaches you how to override discomfort. Smile through it. Scan through it. Lift through it. Corporate resets don’t wait for personal emergencies. There is a planogram, a diagram, a deadline. By 6:00 a.m., customers would expect a transformed store.

Around midnight, I went to the restroom. Locked the stall. Looked down.

There are no corporate verbs for that moment.

I cleaned myself. Flushed. Washed my hands. Returned to the floor.

We reshelved the books.

When the sun rose, the store looked brand new. Clean sightlines. Seasonal tables angled toward the entrance. Bestsellers faced outward like obedient soldiers. My team congratulated one another. We had executed the reset perfectly.

I drove home in daylight, exhausted, empty, and still bleeding.

—

When I was twelve, I had the body of my twenty-year-old self.

That is what the men seemed to think, anyway.

I would stand outside my middle school waiting for my mother to pick me up, backpack hanging heavy from one shoulder, and cars would slow. Windows would slide down. Voices—grown men’s voices—would call out things I did not yet have language for but understood were not compliments.

I learned to fold into myself. Shoulders rounded. Eyes down.

At a red light in downtown Kansas City, an old man pulled his car alongside ours. I was in the passenger seat. My mother was driving. The afternoon sun was merciless, illuminating everything.

He stared openly.

Licked his lips.

Made exaggerated kissing faces.

Then he motioned for me to roll down the window.

I froze.

My mother’s voice cut through the silence. “Look away.”

I did.

We drove on.

No police report. No confrontation. Just another entry in the quiet ledger of things girls absorb without ceremony.

By thirteen, I understood that my body was public property. By sixteen, I understood that it could also be punished for being visible. By thirty, I understood that even in loss, it would be expected to perform.

—

At the doctor’s office now, years later, the questions are clinical.

How many pregnancies?

The nurse does not look up from the tablet.

I have learned the cadence they expect. Learned to deliver it without tremor.

“Three,” I say.

Pause.

“Two living, one deceased.”

Deceased. The word feels formal, as if it belongs in an obituary column between strangers. Not in the hollow space of a bathroom stall at midnight under fluorescent lights. Not in a bookstore aisle between Self-Help and Spirituality.

The first time I answered differently, I said, “I had a miscarriage.”

The nurse nodded briskly and typed. The word miscarriage is softer, almost accidental. As if something simply slipped. As if gravity were to blame.

But I remember the schedule.

I remember the verbs.

Remove. Relocate. Reshelve.

I remember the blood seeping through fabric while I aligned hardcover spines into a perfect, marketable row.

Bodies, like bookstores, are rearranged to suit demand.

When I was twelve, men rearranged me with their eyes.

When I was thirty, corporate rearranged me with a schedule.

In both cases, I complied.

There is a strange continuity between the girl at the red light and the woman in the bookstore. Both are told, implicitly, that discomfort is manageable. That silence is preferable. That work—whether the labor of looking away or the labor of lifting shelves—must continue.

And yet, there are also my two living children.

They run through libraries now, not bookstores. They pull volumes from shelves without fear. They ask loud questions. They exist in their bodies without apology.

When I fill out forms, I still say it.

Two living.

One deceased.

It is an inventory of sorts.

An accounting.

Not just of pregnancies, but of the ways a body can be claimed, interrupted, endured.

In my thirties, I led an overnight reset.

By morning, the store was transformed.

So was I.

Not in a way anyone could see. There was no ribbon cutting, no applause. Only a quiet understanding that something had been removed and would not be reshelved.

The shelves looked full.

But I knew what was missing.