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Nina Budabin McQuown Honorable Mention story in the 2005 Nick Adams Short Story Contest |
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Return to: ... Nick Adams Contest ... Winning stories and authors ... ACM home page Note: This story is reprinted with permission. Copying this story without the express, written permission of the author is prohibited. |
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You-know-who ate the baby. I find myself wondering half the time if this was a scripted thing. It's not a secret, I know that much, only no one's ever asked me straight up how much I know. They ask how I got to the lower East side and I tell them I had a spacious, rent controlled apartment at one time but I didn't like the smell of the place. I had a baby at one time, but I never saw it grow into a child. Then people ask what happened and my answer is simple and evasive "it suffocated" and they don't want to press, but across the table I can see in their concern the distinguishable features of the many things they can't digest.
It was a big, wide roomed apartment on the third floor of a five story building. The baby did not live there long. I was there for five years and the fourth year I got pregnant. I thought that because I was lonely I would want the baby more when I had it. It wasn't true, although they tell you it happens. I stayed lonely after the baby, and it loved me with a need I found repugnant, though I would not have used that word out loud. The baby was named the last name of a president. As soon as that name was down on paper I began to regret it, but didn't tell the nurse for fear of aggravating her. She was a woman of color. I don't think she liked me at all. I called the baby by another shorter, less assuming name. I have never liked anyone named Truman or Jefferson or Lincoln or any other pretentious name. I try not to be pretentious. This is visible in the words I choose like sad instead of utterly despaired and everywhere instead of ubiquitous. At that point I'd been using small words to speak to people for so long that I'd forgotten all the big ones I used to know except in reading. I couldn't ever call them up in speech.
The baby could not speak. It always amazed me. I can't imagine what it must be like to have a brain with no words in it. I think emotions must be so pure and felt without meaning restraining them. That the baby does not mean sad by crying was always an incredible realization for me. I had to constantly remind myself that crying was not a judgment. The baby was hungry or needed to be changed and that's just the way it told me. Still, I think I thought it cried more than other babies. I took a six month paid vacation with it. Some days I didn't believe I'd ever go back. It wasn't because the baby might grow up to hate me or anything; how could a baby hate its mother? I'm not even really sure babies grow up. I think they shed like snails and crabs. I had a boyfriend once who was pretentious. He made me remember all the words I had forgotten. I kept them in a dictionary that held up the third leg of my table. At that table I had conversations with him about the egocentric predicament. I think the words I used to dump him were "I don't care anymore." First he told me I was no good. Then he slammed his coffee cup down on the table top again and again like a bunch of punctuation, like a thousand unnecessary exclamation points that only ended when the coffee cup broke. Then he left. He waited outside my window all night: I could smell his cigarette smoke coming in through the screen. I think when I left for work he climbed the drain pipe and came in like the nicotine. He packed his things in a suitcase, I never saw him again. Actually I saw him once in a big book store franchise on a poster. He only signs books that he wrote.
I read in a book that a baby is not like a right arm in any way. What that means, of course, is that you can't control it. My baby is not just an idea of a baby and like a dog it will die if I don't feed it. I wanted a dog when I was eight years old and my father said, "If I get you a dog you have to feed it and walk it and clean up after it and never be angry at it because it cannot understand." "I'll be good with it." I said. "That's not enough." said my father. I don't think he believed me and I didn't get a dog. I had a lot of snakes; although I couldn't stand to feed them, I liked to watch them eat. Every week I would bring a mouse home from the pet store down the block. All the way home I could feel it inside, scratching with its twiggy toes around the brightly colored take-home box. I would lift the box up to my ear and listen to it squeaking and scratching, I always liked mice. In the block between the pet store and my house I got attached to every one of them. Sometimes I gave them names. Once I got home I gave the mice to my mother who would walk with me into my bedroom where the snake was. I would leave then and I guess she would fish the mouse up out of the dark box and dangle it into the cage and the snake would snap it up and she would call me and I'd come into the room. I liked to watch them eat, their bodies moving backwards in waves as if the tides had reversed and were converging somewhere in the middle of the ocean unseen. I liked it as the dead mouse disappeared into the never ending neck of my pet snake until finally just the tail hung out of the open jaws like an untidy piece of spaghetti and the snake looked so silly that I laughed and laughed. I think my mother liked to see me laugh; I always noticed that she watched me watch the snake. |
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Note: This story is reprinted with permission. Copying this story without the express, written permission of the author is prohibited. |
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