Nº3

HUNG JURY


AN ORIGINAL SHORT STORY BY TORI METCALF


The minute you turn thirty-three, everyone in your life is simultaneously struck by the urgent need to know if you want to be a mother. The former colleague you’re meeting for lunch. The older woman on the plane trapping you in your window seat. Family and friends with their casual (and not so casual) interventions. They can smell your fertility rotting. They worry you don’t have a plan.

Spoiler alert: you don’t.

You were raised to believe the answer would be simple. A full, body-aching “yes.” A firm, considered “no.” But you’re stuck in between. Sometimes you lie to the stranger holding you hostage in row twenty-four that your uterus was destroyed in a horrible bungee jumping accident because that is easier to explain than your ambivalence.

You keep hearing you’ll discover the answer if you “just look deep inside yourself,” so you muster up the courage to face your fears, and you do what every woman does when she is lost and on a deadline: you organize a committee.



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