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Yukiko doodled on a café napkin while she waited, the brash sounds of New York not even registering after living in Tokyo for so long. Every so often, her left hand rose to her swollen stomach as if to check that everything is okay.
“Sorry I’m late,” Chris Vineyard said breezily while pulling out a chair. “Rehearsal went overtime because one of the actresses kept forgetting her lines.” She gave Yukiko an amused smile. “You should take her place.”
Yukiko laughed and pushed the napkin away. “Eight months pregnant?” she teased. “I’d fill up the whole stage.” Chris tilted her chair back with feline grace and gave Yukiko’s only moderately swollen stomach an appraising look.
“I’m sure that many soon-to-be mothers would kill for your figure while being pregnant,” she observed dryly. She let the chair fall back into place, the writing on the abandoned napkin grabbing her attention. “What’s this?” she asked and plucked up the paper before Yukiko could respond, only to find the entire surface of the napkin covered in wishes of good luck and good fortune. She raised an eyebrow in question, causing Yukiko to blush.
“The first words a parent says to a child are important,” Yukiko insisted.
“And you can’t come up with the perfect phrase?” Chris guessed based on the multitude of platitudes covering the napkin’s surface.
“Not yet,” Yukiko admitted.
“Hmm,” Chris said. “A couple I know, two scientists, just had a second daughter, and their first words to her were rather…remarkable.”
“You went to a birth?” Yukiko asked, surprised. “But you said you wouldn’t even come to mine.”
“I didn’t have much of a choice. I had to make sure nothing…undue happened.” She waved away Yukiko’s confused look. “Anyway, the mother’s first words to her daughter were this.” She leaned in and whispered the words in Yukiko’s ear.
“Oh,” Yukiko breathed, “that sounds perfect.”
One month later, after five hours labor, Yukiko cradled her tiny son in her arms and thought of those words Chris had told her at that New York café. They sounded so exciting and wondrous, like a line from a movie. She leaned down and whispered in the perfect shell of her son’s ear,
“May you live in interesting times.”
She only learned, years later, that it was actually a curse.