Breach
by Lucy Zhang
My mother-in-law claimed that my work caused my breech baby, and the only way to flip him was to drink white peony tea and quit, never mind that I couldn’t quit my job else we’d be down half an income—although trust me, I’d love to have quit. My baby ended up punching his way out, a mutant breech unwilling to contemplate the notion of being cut out from the top. Not even too high a cut. Bikini cut style so scars remain hidden even when stretch marks reign free. But he lived and I lived and I thought that was the end of it.
Except my son kept getting lost. Or, I kept losing him in this placenta-exterior era. I found him sitting in cupboards, crawling by the window sill, sleeping on the car hood. An aimless wanderer who I feared would one day slip through a crack in the asphalt and find himself in another dimension. Because you let money win over your heart, my mother-in-law chastised. A baby can’t find its way back to a heart void of maternal devotion. I disagreed: getting lost simply meant knowing where to search, when to give up. Even vanishing through a space time continuum couldn’t deter my son’s intuition to find home: the smell of vinegar and garlic, the feel of a tousled carpet in patches of bald and clumped tufts from the dog’s nails, the taste of microscopic drops of breast milk squeezed from sore, tender nipples bubbling with blebs. A baby who had ripped his way through me would never struggle to find the tear and stretch it until there’s enough space to fit a mother’s “heart of devotion” and then some.
Lucy Zhang writes, codes, and watches anime. Her work has appeared in Virginia Quarterly Review, Shenandoah, The Massachusetts Review, and elsewhere. Find her at https://lucyzhang.tech or on Instagram @Dango_Ramen.
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What surprising, fascinating stuff can you tell us about the origin, drafting, and/or final version of “Breach”? “Breach” has simple origins. At the time I wrote this, my baby was breech, and I was madly doing downward-facing dogs and All The Stretches to get him to flip. Did the stretches work? Or did he magically decide to flip on his own? I’ll never know. Simultaneously, I was contending with parents and their traditional (occasionally pseudoscience-based) beliefs on pregnancy and childbirth, and thus this piece was born in a bout of frustration.
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Poetry, creative nonfiction, and fiction/prose poetry submissions are now closed. The reading period for standard submissions opens again September 15, 2025. Submit here.
Upcoming
11/17 • Alison Colwell
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