Jacob Aiello

In the spring my wife Amy and I are going to Paris. We decided on it last summer en route to my mom’s house for her seventy-fourth birthday, and today I bought the plane tickets. Amy’s never been. I haven’t been in nearly thirty years. It will be only the second real vacation we’ve taken in the sixteen years we’ve been together, which we both agree is hardly enough to nourish a relationship. On the inside of each of our wrists are tattooed three dots, one for each of our three miscarriages like ellipses trailing off into silence. The promise to ourselves when we became a childless couple that at the very least we’d take advantage of our childlessness has not been kept, and there is an effort in taking this vacation to sublimate our past failures into such an experience that it will sustain us.