My Baby Is a Fish

Anna’s mace had backfired, but she’d gotten in a good kick to Carver’s groin, and a solid poke to his left eye. Her frantic shoving and insistent, “I’m pregnant. My boyfriend’s coming, my boyfriend’s coming. Iampregnantassholemyboyfriendscoming,” had startled her attacker enough that he forewent shoving her sweatpants the rest of the way down and was satisfied with supplying a few swift punches to the left side of her face and a swipe of dirty thumb over her bottom lip. Pushing himself off the gravel with his long, crooked fingers, he’d jogged shakily down Franklin Street with only the swampy street lights to guide him. This wasn’t the first time this had happened to her and it probably would happen again. Animals were everywhere.

The pugilism had made Joseph’s body all sinew and reflex. After seeing Anna’s black eye and ripped shirt, he had torn down the street, sprinting after the shadowy, limping figure in short, practiced bursts of speed. He caught up with him quickly, and after jamming Carver into the ground, he’d given him two pulled jabs to the face, effectively shattering Carver’s right cheekbone and then, with his good hand, Joseph seized the attacker’s testicles and squeezed and squeezed. The cops showed up a few minutes later, to find Joseph snarling violent promises into Carver’s beaten face. Joseph’s bail was set at eight grand, but Anna didn’t have any money with her student loans piling up and the baby coming. Carver’s ego tended to be either charming or overtly aggressive, and very little in between, and Joseph was just black enough for it to be an open and shut case on both ends: aggravated assault, three years, half that with good behavior.

Being one fourth Namibian and the rest Northern Irish was a beautiful genetic mixing that gave Joseph a lovely delicate, almost mocha tint to his skin and the thick black hair and clear emerald eyes of his father. It left him instantaneously accepted and rejected from both major camps in the Kansas City jails. He sits on the cusp of both, and for being so confusing should be shivved on sigh — a fitting end, he had thought. A clean metaphor for his whole life: belonging without really ever belonging, and being hated for simply existing with such perplexing complexities rushing through his blood.

But, the paddys from the local MC don’t fuck with his Jello and the Fremont Hustlers call him “Casper” and let him spar in peace. The warden gave him a gig in the library, like he’s their Dufresne. Turns out, convicts take kindly to those in for defending women, especially pregnant ones. Just as they take not so kindly to those who see to the raping of them — Carver didn’t last three weeks (Whether they got him in the showers or on the yard, or with the soap, shank, or fists, Joseph and Anna didn’t know and they didn’t much care). Joseph gets high-fived in the cafeteria and given the good pillows. Anna had little doubt that he would make it out alive. She wasn’t worried. She was just sick of waiting. He is three months into his sentence and he’s already acquired that hardened edge to his voice that mixes delicately and dangerously with his naturally condescending tone.

“David and Ben show up yet?” Last time they had spoken Joseph had asked, in all seriousness, if David was “hitting that” yet.

“They’ve been here all along. I called Benny when I –” She runs the worn washcloth down both her arms, from shoulder to the tip of her middle finger. The tub was shallow and narrow, but by sitting in the warm water the telling twisting and shuddering of her cervix had lessened. Doctor Singer told her the cramps would be gone by tomorrow, that it would feel like nothing had happened. She clears her throat, “when I hemorrhaged. David’s here with me now. Packing and stuff.”

A few minutes after she arrived home from the hospital, David started making that pinched expression of his, like he was debating whether to fight or flee, to hold her or punch something. His eyes kept shifting between the hanging pots beside her head and her stomach; he would lift his hands towards her periodically, and would then drop them down to his sides, curling them into fists.

She told him to pack up all toys and bottles in the living room. She’d fled to the bathroom soon after that. She had run the tub as hot as the old water heater would allow so that the room would fill with a pleasant white fog. Telemachus, her and Ben’s old, arthritic dog (who they had saved in a fit of good citizenship three years ago) lays parallel with the sink, whining softly. She can hear David grunting and lifting and taping boxes shut and a slight spit of rain haphazardly hitting the roof. The calm, pleasant sound of his heavy gait makes its way towards the front door. The screen door shuts and she strains to hear him pull a tarp over the truck bed.

“Right, right. Your bitch of sister show her face yet?”

“She’s coming. She promised.”

She can hear him spit and practically feel his face pull into a grimace. He grits out his favorite phrase for any woman who annoys him, like ring girls and bookies, but particularly her sister: “That stupid bitch.”

She lies in the tub; her damp shoulder pressing the phone uncomfortably against her ear, idly thinking of the voice mail her sister had left earlier this afternoon. Piper had prattled on that no planes are lifting off out of Portland and she was renting a car, driving up to Seattle to get a flight out. Had David and Ben gotten their shit together yet? Something about OTH being run by fascists, and her firm got a discount if she flew AirTran. She’d be in Lawrence by the early evening. She loved her. She will be there. If the hospital tried to strap her baby sister out of leave time, she’d sue their asses off. Sorry for saying “baby.” She had to drop her cat, Monty, off with a friend.

Joseph mumbles, incoherent and sleepy, a cigarette in between his lips. She can’t remember when she heard the snap of a match, signaling him lighting another one (this was number four). And while she wants nothing else than to plead with him to stop smoking, she feels like it’s time to choose her battles. The water is cold now, and she can see that the skin on the soles of feet are pale white and fragile under the soapy water.

“I’m sorry.”

He huffs, “It’s not your fault, Annie,” She can barely make out the hitch in his breath over the raspy connection and Telemachus’ heavy, wet pants, “This is no one’s fault. This — It happens. Listen, love, Warden’s pitching a fit on the other side of the glass, I gotta go.”

After the news of her miscarriage had made it through the jailhouse, the warden had pulled him from the yard, uncuffed him, and shoved two packs of Unfiltered Malboro Reds and a box of Strike-Anywheres into his hand. He placed him in an empty conference room, gruffly pushing him down in a chair with a, “Go on and call your old lady, Joey.” No one who really knew him ever called him anything but Joseph, but he was trying to let his pugnacity go.

“God, I love you. You know that, right?” She nods, knowing he can’t see and thinks of Matty Carver’s unstaunched eyes, and pulpy, mashed-in face.

•••••••

Ben’s hatchback had been piled high with Target and Baby Gap bags. He could hear his mother chiding, “Reusable bags, canım. Save the planet; reusable bags.” His trunk was stuffed so full of the long-forgotten things that he had to shove the life-sized Batman he had gotten for the nursery in the backseat. Everyone in the store had assumed he was the one with a baby on the way; he had a “paternal glow.” He knew that contentment and happiness were a dangerous medicine (“Nope, just for my godson. God, I have a godson!”), but he couldn’t bring himself to care because he remembers being on the receiving end of some seriously demonstrative cuddling this morning and his advisor had texted him a smiley face this morning — he was in, graduating this December.

His phone erupts in a mass volume of garbled punk rock. Breathing in the first winter air, he lifts the overly expensive phone to his ear and chirps, “Hey, sexy momma.”

“Benny, I need you to listen to me very carefully.”

He knew that voice — that cold, crisp edge, her over-use technical or medical jargon (whichever applied to the situation at hand) and the implementation of his childhood nickname. It’s the same voice that told him that their high school friend, Ruby Samson, had died with a needle sticking out of her foot, when David had flipped his beloved Impala just off of Highway 59 by the A&W where he used to buy pot for his mom. She used it whenever she had bad news that she wasn’t handling as calmly as she would like everyone to think.

“Benny, something’s wrong with the fetus. There has to be something wrong because I will not stop bleeding — I have bled through three pads already and I am getting lower abdominal cramping and diaphoresis — though that may be anxiety related, I’m not sure it’s relevant. I need you to bring a plastic bag to put the used pads in, so the doctor can estimate how much blood I’ve lost. I’m in pain. I need you to drive me to KU Hospital. I need you to get here as fast as you can.”

He and Joseph called it her “mom voice.”

Putting the Jetta into fifth, he caught Batman’s beady eyes in his rearview mirror; he could only think — I’ve killed my godson. I’ve killed my best friend’s baby.

•••••••

It’s surprising to David the sheer amount of baby-related shit an American female could acquire in the short span of fourteen weeks. He had packed up more Monsters Inc. stuffed animals, economy brand diapers and wipes, pointless hooded towels, and breast feeding accoutrement than he thought any human being needed. But, he supposed, this is what people did to make themselves feel more secure: they bought stuff.

He wasn’t much for items of self-comfort. He only had a few scattered things about his efficiency apartment: a Dyson vacuum his aunt bought him a few years ago, some porn rags gathering dust under the futon, a yellowing Polaroid of his mother and baby sister in his clothes trunk, a chipped Mets mug, and an ever-growing stack of books by the toilet.

David had gotten his GED at fifteen so he could work full-time at Meekin’s Auto Garage down the street from his childhood home and help his cancer-stricken mother with her hospital bills. Meekin was a sweet, talkative guy, who was now in his mid-fifties. He liked, what he called, David’s “hutzpah” (though he especially liked, David often thought, that David would never have the heart to tell Meekin’s wife that he was sleeping with the waitress — Carol? Danielle? — from the diner across the street). Presently, all David had to show for himself was a pair of grease-stained thumbs, a dead mother, an ulcer eating away at his gut, three hundred bucks in his pillow case, and an exquisite, self-acquired reading level.

Since the day he dropped out, Ben has given him every book he had to read in his high school honors English classes and in his Lit and Philosophy courses at Washburn, and little things along the way, like Harry Potter and McCarthy’s The Road. David liked Dostoyevsky for when he was happy, Woolf for when felt like he couldn’t move, and Faulkner all the time. He couldn’t finish Melville, tolerated Warton, and Fitzgerald’s last line, “So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past” had made him cry.

Little good those things did then, little good those things did now. He is twenty-five and he is going to need reading glasses soon.

He had asked Anna about the nursery, but she just bit out, “Fucking leave the nursery; just leave it,” which was followed by a soft apology as she ushered the dog in and shut the door to the bathroom behind her. He would’ve dismantled every discount furniture piece he had nailed together and cart them away right now if that’s what she said she wanted. He’d finished painting monkeys in spaceships on the wall and building the little chest of drawers, if that’s what she wanted.

He was busying himself now by moving things about the already acutely organized kitchen. Anna’s house was, well, Anna-sized and always made David, with his 6’5”, two hundred twenty pound frame, feel like a bumbling giant, all cramped against the counters. As he runs a wet cloth over the table for the fifth time, humming along with the Al Green song filtering out from the bathroom, his elbow knocks the file Ben had precariously perched on the edge of the table onto the floor, causing paper to skirt out everywhere. David zeroes in on “Confirmation of dead male fetus” and “CALL 9–1–1 IF FEVER PRESENTS” and “Patient should NOT be left alone until supplemental follow-up appointment in 48 hours, 12/10/2012 13:00.”

“Yeah, no shit, Doc,” David growled as he scooped the pile of papers and threw them in the wastebasket before thinking better of it. Anna might need them for insurance forms. He tucks the file between the fridge and microwave, next to an old, crinkly printed out recipe for Chinese Dry-Sautéed String Beans. He eyes the sonogram on the fridge, which he is a little surprised to see pinned right next to Joseph’s call schedule and the electric bill. Anna wasn’t really the “Look! He has my little nose!” type. But there it was, plain as day — her little nose on the boy’s profile, all huddled in a ball of soft skeleton and half-formed sweat glands.

He gently flips the sonogram over to find “16 weeks w/ Uncle David” written neatly in the slightly bent left-hand corner. David had jumped at the chance to go, calling out to the shift manager that he was taking his lunch and pulled an old hoodie that he kept under the driver’s seat over his oil splattered, white Henley. It was a little too tight around the biceps, and gave an unpleasant pull across his sternum when he made the right turn into the doctor’s office, but it would do in a pinch.

Joseph was long locked up and Ben had papers to grade, but even so, Anna was independent as all get out; she didn’t need someone to sit in on a doctor’s appointment with her and soothe the gooseflesh that appears when the ultrasound gel touched her bare skin. She didn’t need support. He needed it; he wanted to feel included and important, and Anna knew it. So, when he breathlessly burst into the office mid-ultrasound, Anna simply smirked, feigning disgust, “Ugh, take that stupid thing off, you’re embarrassing my fetus in mixed company,” and held her hand out for him to hold.

David stripped off his shrunken sweatshirt and took her clammy hand into his oil covered one. He could not hold back his awed whisper of, “Holy shit. Is that a penis?” Anna had laughed so hard that she snorted and the only other noise she made was a high-pitch wheeze.

A few light knocks on the doorframe rouse him from his thoughts. Ben tiptoes in, eyes downcast as he gives his shoulders a good shimmy, displacing the rain that had gathered in the hollow of his collarbone. Ben’s eyes, which are sunken, bloodshot finally, meet David’s. There are specks of rain on Ben’s glasses. He looks ludicrously lovely in his pea-green coat and askew beanie. “Hey,” Ben whispers softly, “I, uh, got her stuff.” He lifts the prescription bag in his hand, shaking it back and forth, “Al Green, huh? Yikes.” David notices that Ben’s hands are red and wet, trembling from the cold. Ben always forgets his gloves. David closes the space between them and cups Ben’s left fingers in his hand, presses his mouth to the first bunch of knuckles and exhales.

“Did I do this, man?”

David’s lips are still brushing against Ben’s fingertips when he says, bewildered, “Excuse me?”

“Think about it, man. It’s bad omen to buy things for the baby so early on, but I was just so happy, you know? With the baby and my thesis being done and your — your stupid face. This morning I had the whole day free, ’cause I’m, like, done, you know? And you left that note and I was all good-sore. Be serious, did I do this? Did I jinx this?”

Ben possessed the kind of loyalty and empathy that could not be taught, only bred. The kind that left him distraught on his grandmother’s bathroom floor when he was fifteen because he thought Live Through This was the only piece of music that would ever truly express who was, and that somehow Kurt could see him from Rock ’n’ Roll heaven and was shaking his head. A while this kind of compassion made him strong, it also immobilized him at times, making him ache with guilt and worry all over, all the time for no reason, “She was pale and shit and Doc asked me for her blood type and I didn’t know. We’ve known each other since before we could crawl and I don’t know her blood type. We should know each other’s blood types. David, what’s your blood type?”

“AB negative.”

Ben scoffs, head and eyes rolling back towards the ceiling, “Of course it is.”

“Would change if I could.”

“Naw, man,” Ben unconsciously rubs his right thumb along the bridge of David’s nose, “I love who you are, I always have.”

Al Green stops crooning and the bathroom door creaks open. David nudges Ben’s forehead with his own, releasing his hand, and leans back against the fridge. Anna wanders idly into the kitchen, Telemachus trailing at her hip. Her left eye no longer had a sickly, 70’s yellow hue to the skin under it, but the one centimeter scar on the right side of her lip will probably always be there. She’d pulled her wet hair back into a bun and was wearing one of Joseph’s oversized red plaid shirts from when he cut wood in the off-season over a green cami that had a damp spot over her left breast.

Ben flapped his hands ineffectually towards his own chest, before sighing and saying, “You’re, uh, leaking, Annie.”

“Oh, I know. I’ve just committed to ruining every sports bra I own,” she exhales, pushing David away from the fridge door, rummaging through, and emerging with an orange juice, “It’s fine, Benny. Dr. Singer said it would stop eventually. Nothing to be done about it.”

When he found her on the floor outside of her bedroom, clutching her slight belly, edging towards him, she had growled “You better kick, right now, you little fucker.” No one in that hospital could have known that she was scared. Anna, who was all of five feet, was always so calm and tall seeming. She bypassed the ER and stalked as best she could, given the circumstances, to the third floor nurse’s station, waved her hospital ID, and demanded Dr. Singer. She had waited with her back straight against the plastic seat and her right knee crossed firmly over her left, breathing shakily in pain. Ben had fidgeted next to her.

Singer had run his diagnostic and determined that performing a D and C would be the best course of action. The squat LPN had offered her what Doc Singer called “twilight,” but Anna was not the avoiding kind. When the vacuum started, Anna whimpered out a low, “Sorry, sorry,” let out a feral yowl and gripped Ben’s hand. Anna continued to apologize in between choked out, guttural sobs. Ben, who had done his best to remain stone-faced and unflappable throughout the whole ordeal, draped his scrub-clad body over her chest and murmured affectionate nonsense in her ear, “Not your fault,” he had whispered, placing his shaky, dry palm over her eyes, “S’okay, Annie. Hush, now. S’okay. I’ve got you. Love you. So much. S’okay, now.” Hear no, see no, he had hoped.

When all was said and done, Singer gripped his arm a bit too tightly, “You must not leave her alone, you understand?” Ben nodded curtly, no need to tell him twice. Doc looked pointedly at his chest, which housed an aqua monstrosity that had “The Mighty THOR!” emblazoned in golden text. Ben self-consciously crossed his arms, “Does she, uh — is her mother coming down?” Ben hadn’t even thought to call her mom.

Anna slammed the cupboard door, “Shit on me, I was supposed to go grocery shopping today. I don’t have anything to make so that Pipes has something warm to eat when she gets here.”

Ben scoffs, “I think the princess will survive,” as David simultaneously reasons, “I’ll go get pizza after I stop by the shed.”

Grinning as she chuffs David under the chin, Anna grins, “You’re a gentlemen and a scholar.”

After a long and precise diatribe from Ben about how many pizzas to get (four) and how much to tip José (thirty percent — “he always smiles at me!”) and what to put on all of them (banana peppers and olives, pepperoni and pineapple, extra sauce, and “surprise me”), David slides on his leather jacket, grumbling about the rain as he makes his way to his truck. His keys are so cold in his house-warm hands they burned a little, and the seat creaks when sits.

Ben runs through the cold drizzle towards him. He is moving his hand in a frantic, clockwise motion. Eventually getting the hint, David winds the crank so the driver’s side window opens in haphazard jerks, and barely gets out, “Banana peppers and olives. I got it, sweetheart,” before Ben is whipping his glasses off, reaching through the window, seizing David by the collar of his jacket and pressing his mouth to his.

“Sorry,” Ben says, skirting his damp hands over David’s jaw and hairline. In one breath, he rushes out, “Impulse issues; don’t wanna miss this — you’re going to come back here after you pick up some eats; we’ll sleep on the couch, you know, don’t wanna leave the girls, they might need somethin’; we can watch the new episode of Ice Road Truckers and make fun of the one guy that is named Muttonchops or whatever, I forget it now — fuck me, that’s going to bug me now — you know, he always forgets to chain his tires.” He inhales deep, taking in David’s stern frown. “Now, I know what you are thinking, grumpy, but you haven’t ruined anything.”

He is deucedly clever and inexplicably perfect, and for such attributes, David sees no issue with turning his head in Ben’s gentle hands and placing a kiss to his palm. Ben grins wide and dopey. David is struck with two saccharine, but simple facts: He may have been Ben’s first, but he was sure that Ben was his only; and he is totally going to get stuck with just the plain cheese pizza and the job of making small talk with Piper because he is completely and unequivocally whipped — he is coming back. With bells on, even.

•••••••

She is going to be chained to the house for at least a week. The hospital was hesitant to not offer the time, something about liability issues. Her boss had tried to explain it to her on the phone, but she was only half-listening because Telemachus was nuzzling at her ankles and whining, like he knew something was wrong and that had been equal parts distracting and heartbreaking. In actuality, they didn’t want to have to deal with the possibility of their only decent physical therapist having crying jags while working with patients. It would be a paperwork nightmare and uncomfortable for all involved. So she was on a “little sabbatical,” but it felt, to her, like a sorted and forced segregation.

When she had gotten confirmation that her baby was gone, she had flashes in her mind of Diet Coke cans lining up her desk, and working sixty hour weeks, and the constant, never-ending underbelly of panic that permeated her person. She wondered to herself as she sat outside of the hospital counselor’s office: “Did I do this just by being me?”

“Those things don’t kill babies,” Dr. Singer had answered, clapping her and Ben on the shoulder. She had been repeating this quietly to herself all day — “Those things don’t kill babies, those things don’t kill babies, I don’t kill babies, those things don’t kill babies.”

The in-house therapist’s office was covered in pastel posters and pharmaceutical rep pens. The “counseling” been a little too Chicken Soup for the Children’s Soul for her taste, but now, sitting against her dead baby’s crib, she wished she would’ve stayed in that office a little longer, maybe gotten Dr. Whatsherface’s card or something. Maybe she knew a guy who knew a guy, or something. “Whatsherface” had her repeat the baby’s name over and over, “Dean, Dean, Dean,” until Anna finally rolled her eyes and said, “Listen, this isn’t making me feel better.”

“Well, it’s not supposed to make you feel better.” Whatsherface had a sweet, noncommittal voice. “It’s supposed to make you acknowledge your pain.”

“That is dumbest thing I have ever heard. I don’t need to ‘acknowledge my pain,’ it is pain. I need it to go away; I don’t need to bathe in it.”

“Look at it this way, ma’am, a miscarriage is nature’s way of sparing you from having an imperfect baby. You’re young, you can have another baby. That is wonderful.”

She lifted herself gingerly out of the hospital chair, gathered her bag, momentarily tilted her head, all birdlike and docile, and responded, “Okay, I think I get it,” and walked out. She had found that playing dumb could get her out of a number of situations. She was blonde and had big boobs, so all in all, it was an easy sell.

Dean had a favorite band, a favorite “uncle” (David), a bellowing laugh, had already gone through high school, in her mind. She had such an active fantasy life in these past few months with Joseph being away. Dean had a magnanimous spirit; he had to have had one in order to go back to his essential parts and expel himself from her naturally, to not force her to push and push and leave with nothing. As if to say, “Momma, I got this one covered.” She had fallen in love with this baby, imperfect or not.

She is lying on the floor of Dean’s nursery, vaguely aware of when she sunk down onto the wooden planks. Staring blankly at Telemachus’ paws, she remembers the dank, buttery smell of the theater’s parking lot, and the lone bead of sweat that moved down Carver’s sunken chest. She remembers being sixteen and having Charlie Swanson chase her through her father’s living room, before lurching forward and snatching her by the hair and pulling her head roughly his way, yanking her back so her throat bared and her blotched face pointed up. His slimy, heavy body pinning her thighs to her parent’s sofa as he dug one fat hand into her pants and got his grimy-looking dick out with the other. “So small, you’re so small,” he had grunted out as he ceaselessly shoved into her and then, finally, mercifully, spurted his release out onto her back.

“Small blessings are something to be grateful for,” her grandmother had always said.

He was a kid about her age that lived around the corner. He used to help her dad do DIY projects around the house. She had just let him in, didn’t even ask what he needed. Her parents never really did completely believe her. Her mother had told her on a drive back from her sister’s winter concert that December, “Please don’t let this ‘event’ define you like so many other women do.”

Anna had intentionally gained fifteen pounds a short time after that, but it didn’t help, just made her hips wider and more apparent, her breasts and arms softer, attracting a different sort. No better, no worse than the first kind. The open trust every child should have was gone by the time she was seventeen. She felt privileged and lucky to have held onto it for that long; most don’t. She was angry all the time and her life wasn’t even that bad. She always told herself to imagine how other people, with bigger, more worthy problems felt. She was trying to tell herself to think of that now.

Telemachus gives a weak bark in warning before she hears Ben clunking down the hall. He slips on his rain-slick sneakers, crashing into the nursery face first, “Hey, Annie. Hey, Tele. Fuckin’ glasses are in my pocket, hope they aren’t busted,” he mumbles into the hardwood.

She drags her tongue across her bottom lip, a smirk shadowing, “I saw you and Davie, you total slut. C’mere.” She pats the floor behind her. He pulls himself over her on his belly, wriggling his legs and arms to get around the crib like when they used to play soldiers when they were kids. He lies behind her, his chin fitting where her neck and shoulder meet.

After Joseph got locked up, Ben had taken to driving past his graduate housing suite and going straight to Anna’s after class. He would sleep next to her in bed, or sprawled out on the couch, surrounded by paperwork patched over with his loopy, belletristic scribe. He always heard her through the thin walls, no matter if she was limping to the backdoor to let the dog out or tossing and turning. Sometimes Anna made noises while she slept: little half-moans and whines. Sometimes she talked. Sometimes she snored, ground her teeth, or would just breathe, all husky and arrhythmic. And sometimes she did none of these things and all of these things at once.

“Tell me all about last night, stud.”

She could feel the heat of his face flushing at the base of her neck when he spoke of how David was gentle. How sweat had poured off David in sheets when he was above him and how David snored in loud bursts when he slept curled up behind him and that he had left a hokey note on the pillow in morning. How he had been self-conscience of his freckled, ripcord thin body; it looked so pathetic and small pressed up against David’s chest, which was all worn and naturally muscled from years of working with his hands. David’s biceps, which Ben likened to pillars of marble, had bracketed him throughout, unwavering and safe. Ben’s spindly legs were covered in burns from the end of cigarette butts and the welts that decorated his back still, fifteen years later, flared fire engine red when he got nervous.

“If he weren’t already dead, I’d rip his lungs out and give them to you,” David had panted out, in between thrusts, “I would’ve killed him when I found out, if you just would’ve let me.” David and Joseph, he and Anna, one and the same.

There was never a doubt in Ben’s mind that his father loved him wholly and completely, the best he knew how. You can’t fault someone for being incapable. The drink had gotten to him too early, killing off neurons and all sense of rationality. This made him feral and prone to bringing out the belt and wrench. He father beat him and beat him and then he wouldn’t and then he’d beat him again. But he didn’t always.

“I just wish he could be here,” Anna croaks and Ben doesn’t ask who, doesn’t need to, and holds her tight, “Show it to me.”

“Wha?”

“The hokey note, if I know you — and I do — you’ve been carrying it around in your wallet.” Ben sighs, lifting his ass up off the wood floor, fishing for the piece of paper. Anna unfolds it, slipping it through her small fingers, taking in David’s scratchy handwriting:

Sweetheart —

Sorry to step out so early, but I’ve got Medusas to slay and cam shafts to replace.

Didn’t have the heart to wake you. I love you, desperately. Suppose that’s where I go weak.

See you tonight.

— D

She folds the note up delicately and holds it in her palm just over her stomach. He follows the path of her hand, gripping her small fist. Both left with nothing but his hand on her empty belly, the smell of new paint, their old whimpering dog, and her mumbling reassurance of “That’s nice, that’s nice. That’s nice.”