My friends said that the baby’s first kicks would feel like butterflies, like goldfish swimming, but to me, they felt exactly like if you took a segment of an orange and squeezed. The gentle pop, the suggestion of tension, the worry that the juice might run. The first time she kicked me in the cervix a sense of dread absorbed me, a certainty that my body was falling apart and could not contain her, because with the kick came a kind of aftershock, echo after an avalanche, and a sense that something had dropped, dropped out of me, and broken. But it hadn’t.

Last night, you rolled over in my stomach. You weigh less than a pound but with my hand, I could feel your body push against mine. You turned over and the bulk of you swelled above my belly button, the place where I was once connected to my own mother, and I imagined you not inside me but encased under a domed infinity, star-lit, turning over in the vast unknown. Pascal said that our terror is inspired equally by the infinitely large and the infinitely small, describing bodies expanding to the scale of outer space and then shrinking down to the size of infinitesimal particles.

I studied atoms in college because I found the planets boring. But with age—and motherhood—I have come to respect the composition of matter: the gaseous planets, the bundles of cells, and then you in your star-lit world-– inside me but unknown to me, secret in my own body. A star-creature so at home in your own dark kingdom, lounging with one leg up, a leg that already looks like mine. Matter which cannot be created or destroyed. You were always there, pulp ready to pop. Every kick predestined, your star-bound roll against my stomach written in infinity.

Susan Holcomb holds an MFA in writing from the Vermont College of Fine Arts and studied for a PhD in physics at Cornell. Her writing has been or will soon be published in the Southern Indiana Review, The Boston Globe, Crab Creek Review, and elsewhere. She lives in Los Angeles with her husband and newborn daughter.