The baby bounced gently off the wall of her uterus. She opened her dressing gown and put her hands back on her belly. It moved again, like a dolphin going through the water; that was the way she imagined it.

The lines render pregnancy with a strikingly physical, unsentimental immediacy: the fetus is not an abstract symbol but a moving body with force and agency, “bouncing” against the uterine wall. Yet the passage also shows how a mother translates that raw sensation into an image she can live with—“like a dolphin”—a metaphor that turns internal jolts into something graceful, familiar, and even playful. The juxtaposition of clinical anatomy (“uterus”) with tender self-touch (hands on belly) captures the oscillation between bodily reality and imaginative attachment, suggesting how intimacy with an unborn child is built through sensation interpreted as story.