Grace Engstrom was on the way to her doctor when the hallucinations began. She put her car into reverse, glanced back to be sure she was clear, and the little red lion figurine on the rear shelf blinked, turned its head to look at her, and said, clearly and distinctly, "Don't go there."

Her foot slipped off the gas, and her late-model Lexus stopped with a tooth-rattling jolt. "What?" she asked. She had bitten her tongue when the car jolted, quite painfully, which convinced her she wasn't dreaming.

"Don't go there.," it repeated. It sounded young, male, and slightly nasal.

"This isn't really happening," she said. "This is a symptom of early menopause."

"You're betting more than your own life on it." the lion replied.

"What does that mean? And why am I talking back to a hallucination?"

It didn't respond. After a wary moment, she reached back and picked it up, half- expecting it would be soft, warm and alive.

It was cold, solid plastic, as always. Her brother Arthur and his family had visited her one summer, and stayed for three days. Her niece Andie found the lion in a box of cereal, and immediately gave it to her Aunt Grace. Grace adored all her nieces and nephews, but also liked her elegant townhouse as it was, free of all things cutsie and tacky. Therefore, she found a place of honor for it in her car, where she didn't have to look at it very often.

Grace regarded the crudely molded toy, then put it in the cup holder, where she could keep an eye on it without craning her neck as she drove.

"Right." She took a deep breath, and finished backing out.

Every so often during the drive, she glanced down at the lion, but it stayed quiet and still.

She arrived at her doctor's, had her weight and blood pressure checked, and was shown into an examination room by a nurse, who handed Grace a paper vest and sarong and left her alone. She had just removed her blouse when a woman's voice behind her said, "Go home and wait for me there."

Dropping her blouse, she whirled around to see—a poster of a cartoon stork. It wore a doctor's vest, eyeglasses, and held an open scroll between its wing feathers. Printed on the scroll was a check list of pre-natal care tips. It had long, feminine eyelashes.

The stork shifted position so its weight was on the other leg, ruffled its feathers, and repeated, "Go home and wait for me there."

It looked like a cartoon on TV. Grace reached out and brushed the poster with her fingertips. It was only paper; there was no flatscreen television built into the wall.

"You're ink on paper." she said to it. "You can't talk. You don't have a brain, and storks can't talk anyway."

It said nothing.

"Anyhow, what do you mean, 'Go home and wait for me there?'"

The stork poster remained stubbornly silent.

"It isn't bad enough that I'm seeing and hearing things. I have to try to interact with them. At least I'm in the right place, if I have to lose my mind. The doctor's going to walk in the door any moment." she murmured to herself, and finished changing into the examination garments.

The nurse knocked on the door, and explained that she had to take some samples. After drawing blood from Grace's arm, the nurse handed her a plastic cup and pointed her to the bathroom.

Peeing into a small container was awkward and disgusting, but she managed to half-fill it. The woman took it, capped it, and, saying, "Doctor Bertram will be with you shortly.", left the room.

'Shortly' meant nearly an hour, but Grace, who was wise to her doctor's sense of time, had her work to keep her occupied. Interweave Knits was doing a feature article about her, and they wanted an original knitting pattern to run with it. She chose a tweedy, green-grey yarn from among the skeins in her bag, and began what she had conceived of as a cardigan with loose, flowing lines.

She had three inches of the back knitted by the time the doctor entered. "The clock just started ticking." remarked the stork. Grace shot it a quick glare, and then transferred her attention to the doctor.

"Hello, Grace." He didn't seem to notice anything unusual, such as a moving, talking poster promoting a particular brand of pre-natal vitamins, but he did seem nervous. As he spoke, he mopped his sweaty brow with a paper towel.

"Hi, Al. How's Melody?" Grace had known her doctor, Alexander Bertram, for well over twenty years, and been his patient for most of them. He and his wife, Melody, were what Grace thought of as friendly acquaintances. She was glad to speak to them at cocktail parties and weddings for ten minutes every six months, and didn't miss them at all in between.

""Oh, fine, just—She's fine. Now, as to why you're here today. You said you think you may be going into early menopause."

"Yes. It's been two months, going on three, since I had my period." Plus, I'm hallucinating…

"I see." He made a note on her chart. "Have you considered that there might be another explanation?"

"Of course, but I'm hoping it isn't as serious as a tumor or a cyst." Ovarian cancer had claimed her college roommate four years before; it had been a slow and painful death. Grace's palms grew damp with fear when she thought of that possible explanation.

"A cyst or tumor." repeated the doctor. "No. It's nothing like that. This will be as much of a surprise to you as it was to me. I ran a test using the sample you provided. Grace, you're pregnant."

Her mouth fell open, and she gasped. "Al— that just isn't funny. I'm forty-seven. And you know as well as I do that isn't possible. After Jack and I tried for eight years, tried everything."

Her words died in her throat, and she swallowed hard. Fertility clinics, fertility drugs, alternative medicine, in vitro fertilization using his cells and hers, using her cells and a donor's, using his cells and a donor's. Always with the same result. Her cells died in the Petri dish, unfertilized, and viable embryos died rather than implant in her womb.

In the end, when the only option left was to use a surrogate mother and donor cells, to make a child who would be completely unrelated to her—her husband had opted instead to find a woman who had no difficulty conceiving his children, and their marriage ended.

"I can't be pregnant. I've never been pregnant. Infertility doesn't just reverse itself, not at age forty-seven!" she protested.

"I don't know, but on the form you filled out, you indicated tenderness in your breasts, a feeling of nausea from the time you wake until about 11AM—."

"I don't actually throw up." she interrupted. "My stomach feels iffy for a while, but I've found out that peanut butter on whole wheat toast and chocolate pudding helps, so that's been my breakfast lately. And lunch."

"I see. Any other food cravings?"

"No."

"You also answered 'Yes' to the question, 'Have you had unprotected intercourse recently?' When was that, exactly?"

"That was in Australia—." Oh. My birthday. The first and only one-night-stand of my life. Which was about two weeks before my period was due. I am pregnant.

"I told you to go home and wait for me there." said the stork poster, with offended dignity.

She kept herself from snapping, "You shut up!" at it. Barely.

The doctor had been watching her face. Now he nodded. "It's true, Grace."

"Oh." It sank in. Her knees threatened to give way, and she sat down on a chair, paper sarong and all. A smile she could not control began on her lips and spread a glow through her whole body. I'm pregnant. I'm going to have a baby. She looked up at the medical man. "What do I do now? Vitamins, exercises, childbirth classes?"

"We'll get to that in just a moment. First, I have something else to tell you. Do you remember when you were here for your annual pelvic and mammogram?"

"Yes. That was—four months ago."

"That's right. At the time, I took a DNA sample to screen for the breast cancer gene. The results came back."

"No. No. I can't have it. Not when I'm finally going to have a child, it would be too cruel—."

"You don't have it, Grace. Instead, the test revealed—There's no easy way to say this. You're a mutant."

She laughed, half in relief, half because the suggestion was so outrageous. "Don't be ridiculous, Al. You know as well as I do that if someone's a mutant, it shows up when they're young—before they're twenty. And as long as we've known each other! You should know I'm perfectly normal!"

"I think it did show—it just isn't obvious. Look at these." He drew several photographs from his inside pocket, and placed them on the desk beside her.

She fanned them out. "Old Christmas party photos. This must be from 1984. What a horrible haircut, I knew it even at the time. What was I thinking?"

"You're not looking at them right. Look at how much Melody and I have changed—and how little you have."

"Al—."

"It's more than on the outside, Grace. You're in the same state of health that you were at thirty. Your blood pressure is as steady as a rock, you never talk about dieting, and I know for a fact you've never had liposuction or botox injections."

"Al! That's enough. I refuse to let you ruin this day for me. The lab made a mistake, that's all. It happens. I'll give you another sample, they'll run the screening again, and it'll be normal."

"You've already had a second screening. That was why I ordered a blood sample."

"If they can get results that fast, why did it take four months the first time?"

He looked away. " Mutant gene screening is considered urgent, and breast cancer screening is lower priority, so it takes longer."

"Really? It's considered more urgent to test a teenager to see if she can bend spoons without touching them than it is to screen her mother for a deadly disease? What a lovely set of priorities." She stood up, and the paper sarong unwrapped itself, forcing her to grab at it.

"I have to ask you to find another doctor.", he said, sounding as though he'd rehearsed his words. "I belong to the Association for Genetic Purity, and I don't accept mutant patients. I only saw you today as a personal favor."

"Al, I—Look. For the sake of our friendship, I'll forgive you. Eventually. I'm going to get a second opinion from another lab, because obviously the technicians here are incompetent. When I come back with a clean genetic bill of health, you can apologize. Forget the pre-natal care. I'll just go buy a book."

"You don't mean you're going to have it?"

"Yes, I do mean I'm going to have it. I won't care if it's a boy or a girl or if it's a Down's Syndrome baby, or if it has three eyes. I'll love it all the more. Goodbye, Doctor Bertram. Now—get out of here and let me get dressed."

"One more thing." He didn't budge. "I am required to inform you I must report all confirmed mutants to the local Mutant Registration Board within twenty-four hours."

She closed her eyes and sighed. "Tell me, Al. Have you only recently become such a nasty, foul-minded little jerk? Or, like my supposed mutancy, have you always been one, and it just didn't show until now?"

He gasped, and she heard the door open and close with unnecessary force.

She dressed quickly, pulling on her garments with rage, but her happiness overwhelmed the anger. Pausing before putting on her blouse once more, she turned sideways and looked at her midsection in the mirror on the examination room wall, imagining it full and round with her future child. She touched her still-flat stomach with wonder. A baby. I'm pregnant. I'm going to have a baby.