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the car, and are gone—into the night.
    She waits until the coast is clear and then rushes toward the spot, finds it, and switches on her other light, a head-mounted work light, like a miner’s lamp. She plucks the condom from the sand, holding the latex sheath of lust, of desire, carefully. The contents have not spilled, that’s the good news, and he has performed well—the tip is full, she figures it’s three or four cc. Working quickly, she pulls a syringe—no needle—from her fanny pack and lowers it into the condom. She has practiced this procedure at home using lubricatedTrojans and a combination of mayonnaise and Palmolive dish detergent. With one hand, she pulls back on the plunger, sucking it up. Holding the syringe upright, capping it, taking care not to lose any, she turns off her lights and makes a bee-line back up the beach to her car.
    She has tilted the driver’s seat back as far as it goes, and put a small pillow at the head end for her neck—she always has to be careful of the neck.
    She gets into the car and puts herself in position, lying back, feet on the dash, hips tilted high. She is upside down like an astronaut prepared to launch, a modified yoga inversion, a sort of shoulder stand, more pillows under her hips, lifting her. The steering wheel helps hold her in place.
    She is wearing sex pants. She has taken a seam ripper and opened the crotch, making a convenient yet private entry. She slips the syringe through the hole. When she’s in as far as she can go, she pushes the plunger down—blastoff.
    Closing her eyes, she imagines the sperm, stunned, drunken, in a whirl, ejaculated from his body into the condom and then out of the condom into her, swimming all the while. She imagines herself as part of their romance.
    After a few minutes, she takes a sponge—wrapped in plastic, tied with a string—and pushes it in holding the sperm against her cervix.
    Meditation. Sperm swimming, beach sperm, tadpole sperm, baby-whale sperm, boy sperm, millions of sperm. Sperm and egg. The egg launching, meeting the sperm in the fallopian tube, like the boy and girl meeting in the parking lot, coupling, traveling together, dividing, replicating, digging in, implanting.
    She has been there about five minutes when there is a knock at the window, the beam of a flashlight looking in. She can’t put down the window, because the ignition is off, she doesn’t want to sit up, because it will ruin everything—she uses her left hand to open the car door.
    â€œYes?”
    â€œSorry to bother you, but you can’t sleep here,” the police officer says.
    â€œI’m not sleeping, I’m resting.”
    The officer sees the pillows, he sees the soft collar around her neck—under the dim glow of the interior light, he sees her.
    â€œOh,” he says. “It’s you, the girl from last summer, the girl with the halo.”
    â€œThat’s me.”
    â€œWow. It’s good to see you up and around. Are you up and around? Is everything all right?”
    â€œFine,” she says. “But I have these moments where I just have to lie down right then and there.”
    â€œDo you need anything? I have a blanket in the back of the car.”
    â€œI’ll be all right, thank you.”
    He hangs around, standing just inside the car door, hands on his hips. “I was one of the first ones at the scene of the accident,” he says. “I closed down the road when they took you over to the church—it was me with the flares who directed the helicopter in.”
    â€œThank you,” she says.
    â€œI was worried you were a goner. People said they saw you fly through the air like a cannonball. They said they’d never seen anything like it.”
    â€œUmm,” she says.
    â€œI heard you postponed the wedding,” he says.
    â€œCanceled it.”
    â€œI can understand, given the circumstances.”
    She is waiting for