Since January, our future had been public. With our parents. With our friends. With the couple in the adjoining apartment. And then, since March, anyone who saw my wife, especially the third-graders she had been teaching since September.

Those students stayed excited throughout April, but the principal worried about perception. Twice, he encouraged her to quit, leaving the final months of the school year in the hands of a substitute, what had always been expected when a teacher, he said, “began to show.” When she asked, he admitted that there was no leave of absence for pregnancy, that her job, moreover, would not be “held.” She was due in July. We were buying a house. She did not miss a day’s work in May.

Throughout June, we shared the second job of preparation. We bought a lawnmower. My father-in-law gave me a set of tools. My mother said, “You’ll be glad I kept these,” and showed us the diapers my sister and I had worn a quarter of a century before. We accepted them without laughing. We bought a bin in which to soak the used, choosing one pliable enough to squeeze between the toilet and the bathroom sink. “For a while,” my wife said as we carried it home. “Until she at least sees that it’s there and being used in the house.”

Picturing the crib her mother gave us being used as well, we bought a mobile that dangled six small, stuffed animals—a puppy, a kitten, a chick, a bunny, a lamb, a cub. I twirled it above my wife as she lay on our bed, saying, “Imagine.” So much for dreaming, but what we didn’t know, the day we moved, was that there was a future that included science about fetal dreams. That our new location was important. That our child would be dreaming of what he was about to see.

Like the elderly during a long, mid-service prayer, our two birch trees swayed throughout our first day in the house. The other, what our neighbors called a “tree of heaven,” drooped and shadowed us. During the second day, a sporadic rain spattered the siding, then settled into soaking the sprawling, weed-choked lawn surrounding our new house.

We chose an album of old doo-wop ballads and turned on the lights in every room to tour as if we were mapping the future. In the spare bedroom, a brightly colored toybox constructed by her father reflected the overhead light. In the living room, from above the stereo, the track lights cast our shadows across the beige carpet.

At the horizon, raised shades of cloud opened to a narrow pink swath, the pastel glow holding for the length of the next cut on that staticky album. “Just the way you look tonight,” the singer crooned, and my wife, knowingly, briefly smiled as we began to dance. From window to window, we both imagined that we were being watched by our closest neighbors. Our dancing slowed to an embrace.

When we paused, we might have been a set piece for that older couple to envy. The sky widened, and we turned off the track lights to let the early evening enter, neither our neighbors nor us knowing that our son who was about to be born was dreaming the presence of natural light surrounding our astonished faces when we simultaneously spoke his name aloud.

We sat side-by-side on our recently purchased couch until twilight dimmed what turned out to be expectation’s last trance-like day. The following late afternoon, the world-to-come interrupted our preparations for dinner. Already packed for joy and sleeplessness, we whispered as if we needed not to disturb our first child’s dream.

*Publisher’s Note:

Epigraph is from “Retinal waves prime visual motion detection by simulating future optic flow” by Xinxin Ge, Kathy Zhang, et al. in Science, Volume 373, Issue 6553 (23 July 2021):
https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.abd0830

For fellow laypersons: “Eyes wide shut: How newborn mammals dream the world they’re entering” (Yale researchers observing the brains of closed-eyed baby mice found waves that help explain why mammals can navigate their environment so soon after birth) by Bill Hathaway in Yale News (22 July 2021): https://news.yale.edu/2021/07/22/eyes-wide-shut-how-newborn-mammals-dream-world-theyre-entering

Links reconfirmed on 6 August 2026.

Gary Fincke’s

latest flash collection, In the Light and Dark, was published on 6 August 2026 by Pelekinesis. His fifth essay collection, After Arson: New and Selected Essays, was released in 2025 by Madville Publishing. His long-form story collections have won the Flannery O’Connor Prize and the Elixir Press Fiction Prize. He is co-editor of the annual anthology Best Microfiction.