They got to the birthing class ten minutes late, just in time for the tired joke. Had to sneak in just as the lights were going down for the projector. Moving up each side of the rows of chairs were nurse trainees like deacons. They were passing out barf bags.
Lester took one, looked into it, then up to the screen.
This was his life. He shook his head, held Janice’s hand, and the movie flickered on. First the date—three years ago this month—then a gurney-level view of a maternity ward rushing by.
Janice’s hand tightened on Lester’s, and he tried to match what she was feeling with everything he was. It was different, though; she was thinking about Brent, or Brianne, and he was still stuck on Dick Man, his stack of photos. Stuck on how ready Dick Man had been to deal with him, how that was probably how he made his real living: letting people skate. For a price.
Most people, anyway. Johnny Hood still hadn’t turned back up for cards, or at Rita’s for lunch, or the chain-link fence by the high school.
Lester wanted to blame him for everything that had gone wrong, but couldn’t talk about it with Wayne or Delbert, either. Because they probably had bench warrants on them for something too.
He laughed with his lips closed.
“You watching?” Janice said without looking over, and Lester nodded, let her fingers twine into his. Her voice was full of everything it should be full of. Brimming over.
The girl on screen was in the delivery room now, masked doctors swarming around her like aliens, the fetal heartbeat drumming into the background.
“—so exciting,” another mother-to-be said behind them, and somebody two rows up started crying, quietly.
Lester watched them, these people he looked like probably, these people who were supposed to be like him, and thought of the sonogram Janice was going to be getting on VHS as well. How it would look with a stripper’s inflatable breasts recorded over it.
He laughed, covered his mouth. Blamed it on the stuff in his system. That he shouldn’t have taken so much.
For the rest of the movie, he focused hard on a small white dot of intense light at the lower left of the screen. A chip in the projector’s lens, maybe. The woman giving birth screaming, clenching, breathing.
This was exactly what Wayne had said it was going to be.
Lester looked at his dot of white, held Janice’s hand, and waited for it to be over, but then she was talking to him, saying his name over and over. And crying.
It was the baby. Lester could hear it.
Without meaning to, he looked up to the baby, the boy, still slathered in the yellow and red of another world. The mother, reaching up for him, drawing him close, pulling her gown aside, over her right breast. A blue coil there for a flash, pale against the white skin. Not a milk vein, but a snake.
Lester felt something give deep inside him. Like a Christmas ornament in space, falling in on itself, no sound. He felt his lips going like he was reaching down with them for a straw.
He was trying to breathe again.
Her name was Linda, the mother on-screen. Linda, no husband, no coach, just her. Linda, from four years ago, and this movie was a year later, almost. Nine months. And maybe you got to deliver for free if you let somebody videotape it for a class.
Her name was Linda, and—his son.
Bint. So small on-screen. So delicate. So loud, and mad, a teenager already.
Lester said it out loud, just once—Bint—then someone stood into the dust-filled beam of light, his lanky shadow sharp on the screen.
Johnny Hood.
Lester swallowed, made himself swallow, his eyes watering from the effort, the heat welling up inside of him.
Johnny Hood winked at him with the whole side of his leathery face, his steel trap criminal mind planted deep in that blue snake tat, the one Lester had tried to trade him once—the sure thing—and then he did the last thing Lester would have ever expected: flashed his wolf smile past him, to Janice, who stiffened beside Lester, clung to his arm like she was afraid. Like she didn’t want this.
“No,” she said, maybe.
“What?” Lester whispered loud, between the two of them, suddenly aware of the fifteen minute breaks Janice got twice a day, but Johnny just shrugged, fingershot both of them, then sloped back out into the world, his hands in his pockets, his shoulders rounded. Lester didn’t say anything, and neither did Janice, until they were driving home. Missing their street, having to dogleg back around.
“Is it—” she started, then closed her eyes, started again: “ . . . a paper towel tube, right?”
The paper towel tube was how their instructor had said to baby proof their house: if it’ll fit through, then it’s a choking hazard.
Lester found her hand on the seat between them, took it without looking down.
“We can just tie everything from the ceiling maybe,” he said, and she scooted closer, onto the hump, and told him that would be perfect, yes, please, and Lester held her shoulder as he made the next left turn, so she wouldn’t slip away, and had no clue anymore what street they were on. Just that it was smooth. That he could drive it all night if he needed to.
——————————
My German Daughter
by Nic Young
You were heavier than I expected, and the room felt bigger than it was. Kelly and the nurse watched my every move. I tried to see our faces in yours, but you were buried in cotton. You stirred and I handed you to the nurse. Kelly’s eyes fluttered and closed. I stood there, waiting for the faith that when I reached for the door I’d feel the cold surface of the handle.
———
Kelly’s words are gone but I remember the sour, metallic taste that spilled into my mouth before I hung up the phone. I stared at the ceiling and listened to my parents move through the house. The sunlight turned orange then faded behind the growing shadows of spring flowers. My stomach felt hollow. It burned whenever my father’s footsteps rose and fell past the door.
“Dad?”
He entered and I stared at the neat crease of his trousers.
“Yes, my boy?”
“Remember when you asked if Kelly and I were sleeping together?”
“Yes.”
“I lied. We were. We used a condom but it didn’t work.” Another lie.
Kelly and Megan sat on a bench outside our classroom. The seam of Kelly’s dark jeans turned a strained, aching white at her thighs. Folds of floral maternity-wear enveloped her arm where it cradled her bulging stomach. Megan’s fingers rested on top. She yanked her hand away, and they squealed with laughter. Kelly saw me and froze, then looked away at the ground. I wanted to talk to her, to ask her what she needed, but Megan stared me off. She took Kelly’s hand and leaned in close to whisper some substitute for the support I couldn’t give.
———
A thin woman with brittle eyes and a forced smile met us on the porch of a house that was no longer a home. A sign above us read Choices. The woman shook Kelly’s hand.
“Hi, I’m Ms. Emslie. It’s nice to meet you, Kelly. Please, come in. It’s cold out here.“
Ms. Emslie nodded to me, then ushered us inside and showed us to a small, pastel-colored room packed with dated furniture. She fussed Kelly into one of a pair of faded sofa chairs, and I took the other.
Ms. Emslie straightened, finally satisfied that Kelly was comfortable.
“I’ll be right back. Just going to fetch us some tea.”
She looked at me and shut her eyes in a single, extended blink, then shook her head and left the room, closing the door behind her. I stuffed my hands into the front pocket of my hooded sweater. It was the first time Kelly and I had been left alone together since before that phone call. I dodged eye contact and turned to examine a watercolor painting of a sunset behind us.
“How have you been?” I asked, still staring at the painting.
“I’m okay.” She laughed into her lap. “Getting big now.”
&
nbsp; “And you’re managing?”
“I guess. Everyone at school has been really nice. I expected them to hate me or something.”
I turned to her and nodded.
Kelly looked at me. “And you?”
The door opened and Ms. Emslie came in with a tray bearing biscuits and a single cup of tea. She put it down and started to sit in the remaining couch, but stopped and glanced around the room. She left and came back with a high-back wooden chair, which she set down next to Kelly.
“You’ll be meeting a lovely young couple from Germany. They’re unable to have children of their own. The man is an engineer, and his wife used to be a model. She’ll be a stay-at-home mom. They’ve got two dogs and a big garden.”
She smiled and handed Kelly the cup of tea.
———
I passed the German couple on my way into the maternity ward. A white hospital gown dwarfed Kelly’s tiny frame, and the knowing, rounded features of a mother seemed to clash with her youth. She held a newborn baby girl. Her own mother stood by her bed, either allowing herself or presenting for Kelly a grim smile. She left when I entered.
Kelly sat up and I remembered how my father had said that holding me for the first time was the most powerful experience of his life.
She slurred her words.
“Do you want to hold her?”
——————————
What Was There Inside the Child
by Blake Butler
I was going to tell you now what was found there on the air inside the child
how when the child’s soft child skin became exploded, the ideas or items stored in the child’s innards splashed against the night in liquid cloth
I was going to tell you all about this and then I wasn’t and now I am going to again
how the child’s ex-flesh laid upon the air we’d all been breathing in skeins of ruptured blood and tendon, wadded cells and other shit that for years had made the child’s skin go kaboom
the cause of the explosion not being something I have the will to outline here and now in fear of god
a god who may by now also have exploded
or turned to blackness
or to ash
as how most evenings, and in this writing, I can not see even just my hand right there before my face
except in swift moments among the globes of soft explode-light, cold and gloaming over all
a kind of light that for years had been only found in certain types of horses, in the meat inside their minds
I was going to speak aloud about this child
ours
one of the hundreds we’d seen bursting in the magicworks of mud and longing
slung through our nearing streets and cul-de-sacs among a cavalcade of lathering and awful gloss
the skies in throes over all children, for their fresh flesh, for where they had not yet become sore
their bodies quick in precognition of the coming moment, gloaming, their hands straight up over their heads, postures flattened into erect as if being stretched or slightly thawed
and their eyes
the way the lashes would molt to bright white, and the skin around their holes would fill with blood, growing so dark around the edges that all and any other light seemed sucked down or turning hard, like little combs or keys or jewels someone could wear pinned to a shirt or in their hair
and how the skin around the neck and chest would turn translucent and there would be a slight decreasing of the child’s size
a tautening around the kneecaps and at the earlobes and armpits, shriveling as if parched or quickening in years
Though some children
in their uncoming
would not even blink or itch at all
there would be nothing there about them that seemed changing, until their heads and skin and sight burst into flues, fleshy human banners than flew upon the screaming human air as if in pleasure
as if something on the air was being formed as the explode-light scratched at our eyes
dressing the face of the earth around us in marbled scabs and hazy patches and large pastures in which nothing could be seen
Through most of these explodings I’d hid my face and held my head between my hands
And though I could not keep the sound of the skin ripping from out of me, the throttled milliseconds as the lungs sprayed waste, I could for sure keep myself all hours inside, fortified against the night
swearing never again to step foot into the nothing where even cows had grown demon-sized teeth inside their heads
and how the grass was spurting acid
and money barfing from the light
how I could teach my sagging body to let me live off of the fluff out from the sofa, suck the sweet out of the ink, gnawing my own hair and tongue and knuckles in the meantime, in the idea that surely soon this would all bend
the evenings soon would return silent and I could sleep again in minor light
but this child
this is me telling
this one I’d held for years in hours, already old
he who’d lived inside me for such stinging time and time regardless
who’d therein eaten of my body and swaddled up a body of his own
(I could not control which cells of mine inside my body he had taken and which he’d left for me to grow old with, made of, alone)
he who then had taken those soft sections in him and stretched them fleshing over bones
years in rooms where I could not see what he was doing, what he would make of what he had made of parts of us
how hid in those nights I could sometimes feel among the evenings the ache of his insertions, his destroy
sitting up still in the bed where he’d been made there with my whole chest hardened into bone
knowing without knowing
what he knew then and then knew
The child’s first layer on the air was made of such light that it made the light already trundled on the air go curved
slowing out around the edges of my vision, flexed, so that in this light here I saw the sky under the sky
the sky with our names printed on it, peeling
the sky with bodies hung from it in troves, fat pock-marked purses of slopping bodies, divided in their drooping into colored groups
colors not of how the skin had been in living, but the current state of their decay
some of the bodies in cluster like enormous fruit, globes glistened, picked apart by gobs of geese, and gnats grow fat off of the black-blistered ankles, so distending
I felt hungry in the child’s light, I could not help it
I felt like breathing money, meat, so badly
I could hardly therein stand
From the child’s first layer burped the next one, a job of old fat that poured upon the room of air
columns wobbling in the child’s breeze, each tied to some exploded center in him, clubbed with wart
Sat in the fat among the burstflesh the child had all these visions nuzzled hid, rendered in him in the shapes of items from our house
things I had long written off as discarded or sucked under or eaten or misplaced:
—the bit of hair I’d scalped off the child’s head as soon as he could grow it, nut-brown and slick, a lock I’d needed to remember to remember, or in reclaiming, a lock he’d sucked into himself from out of me
—the key to the black box under a false board in my closet, for which I’d combed the house a hundred thousand times, fraught with such heat in my seeking that I could no longer now even recall what that black box itself contained
—a node of bone that’d killed our only cat by choking, its gristle still somewhat rubbed into the grain
—a bullet I might inside the night had dreamt to use and use and use soon on someone again already gone
All our other crap in wrappers and uncoming sunk too deep in the bloodseam and flesh for me to read:
the pictures of me enraptured at the chil
d’s center’s center, thrown in poses I had never known I’d held;
my mother’s pads of skin that’d come off her in her thinking;
the lizards in my sleep
hair in my mouth
From out of this, under so much junk, the child’s third and thickest layer sprayed
mud on the air so hard and fast then that air was mud too, and so was I
every color in one color
so much mud I could not think
and everyone was looking
all the flesh turned cinder, bone
blood was pouring out my blood, from the rafters
all you were was old
Among the mud I sensed the scent of something burning—the lick of wet flames enmassed and eating where they’d ate
ash of ash and ashes’ ashes
in this too I drank the drink
I could taste so much of where the child had been, his skin a book of stink
—the mesh of all he’d ever eaten, smushed and buttered into cells, or stored in doors and tiny ovens, in skins that separated what was inside him and what out—destroyed—the teems of beef and sauce and blubber; the chocolate, the rice; the mass packaged cellophanes of colored cereal and meat shanks frozen into crème; the butter, nubs and chutney; muscles; things that had grown out of the ground; the water, blood; the oil
—the stink of my own liquids, having all throughout me aged, and transferred to the child among such purring, the smelting of our air so tightly wound we could not sit still—how in the house the walls were always nearer than they’d been just before, I knew—how I could feel this—and yet I would get up every day—I would walk into the folding of the air, a lidless throng so crushed and neverending it had no color and no sound
—the stink as well of what had come into me to make the child there and what had been about that other body then—the mosaics of cells stuffed therein fused or scrabbled against mine, so hard I could hardly see which was which and what was gone