Imogene is tiny, all-white. Spun-sugar hair, pale forehead, chalky arms. Imogene the Ice Queen. Imogene the Milk Princess. A black spiderweb is tattooed on her left biceps. She is a resource allocation manager for Cyclops Engineering in Laramie, Wyoming.

Herb is medium-sized, bald, and of no special courage. His smile is a clumsy mosaic of teeth. Veins trail like root formations down his forearms. He teaches molecular phylogeny to undergraduates. He and Imogene live in a single-storey brick and cedar on five acres fifteen miles from town. Sage, most of it is, and skeleton weed, but they have a few cottonwoods in a dry creek bed, and a graveyard of abandoned tyres Herb is trying to clear, and whole bevies of quail that sometimes sprint across the driveway in the early mornings. Imogene has twenty-two birdfeeders, some pole-mounted, some suspended from eaves, platform feeders and globe feeders, coffee-can feeders and feeders that look like little Swiss chalets, and every evening, when she comes home from work, she drags a stepladder from one to the next, toting a bucket of mixed seeds, keeping them full.

In September of 2002, Imogene swallows her last birth-control tablet and she and Herb go out to the driveway so she can crush the empty pill container with the flat edge of the wood axe. This excites Herb: the shards of plastic in the gravel, the taut cords in Imogene's throat. He has been thinking about children all the time lately; he imagines himself coming home from class to find offspring on all the furniture.

Over the next thirty mornings Herb and Imogene have sex twenty times. Each time, afterwards, Imogene tilts her hips towards the ceiling and shuts her eyes and tries to imagine it as Herb described: vast schools of his sperm streaming through her cervix, crossing her uterus, scaling her fallopian tubes. In her imagination their chromosomes stitch themselves together with the smallest imaginable sound: two teeth in a zipper locking.

Then: sun at the windows. Herb makes toast. A zygote like a tiny question mark drifts into her womb.

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'Procreate, Generate' will be printed in full in Granta 97: Best of Young American Novelists 2. To subscribe to Granta and receive the entire issue free, or to buy a copy of Granta 97, click here.