Hig and Melissa’s Unborn Child

Hig and Melissa’s Unborn Child is a presence in the story through memory rather than a living character: the pregnancy, the names the couple considered, and Hig’s private constellation preserve a future that never enters the post-collapse present. The child’s absence becomes especially legible when Hig encounters a boy about the age the child would have been.

Identity and Intended Names

In the second trimester, Hig and Melissa decided they wanted to know the child’s sex. They had chosen Spencer for a boy and Sophie for a girl, giving the unborn child distinct possible identities even though the narrative does not establish that either name became the child’s name. These plans are among the few concrete details preserved about the child, and they show the couple imagining a future in which the child would be born and grow up.

The Child’s Imagined Age

Nine years later, Hig sees a boy during an encounter with armed survivors and estimates that the boy is about nine. The scene brings the pregnancy back into view: Melissa had been seven months pregnant nine years earlier. Hig’s account connects the boy’s age to the child’s absent future, setting a child who has lived through the changed world beside the one Hig and Melissa had expected to raise. The child does not appear as a living presence in the post-collapse narrative; the comparison instead makes the passage of those nine years personal.

Memory and the Constellation

Hig later says that his book on the stars is gone and that his memory is imperfect, so he invents constellations. Alongside patterns named for a Bear, a Goat, and animals that once existed, he makes one for the little Angel. This act gives the unborn child a place within Hig’s improvised map of the night sky. The constellation is not a recovery of the life the child might have had, but a form through which Hig continues to remember that life as part of his own.