I want to kill this baby, but I’m in the middle of making
spaghetti sauce and I really feel the need to get it right this time. Earlier
in the week I’d attempted spaghetti sauce, but the failure was so miserable
that I pretended it was chili.
Another failed attempt could spell the end of my self-esteem. It’s been a hard couple months.
The baby’s mother doesn’t understand. She gets her sauces
out of a can or a jar. She doesn’t think we need to kill the baby. I’ve
explained it to her. She nods but then a few minutes later she asks, “Do we
have to do this?”
The phone rings. I answer it. “Mr. Thusandso? The pictures
of your child are ready.”
“I don’t recall taking photos to be developed.”
“Well, they are here. You should come get them.”
I hang up and tell the baby’s mother I need to run down to
the photo lab. I explain how she must stir the sauce every fifteen seconds with
the wooden spoon. She doesn’t want to do it. “You don’t want to do anything, do
you?” I say. “Back in 5 minutes.”
The photo lab is operating out of the back of a Winnebago. I
hadn’t noticed that before. I knock on the flimsy, aluminum door. It creeks
open to reveal the startlingly aged faced of a female photo developer. “Come
inside,” the old woman tells me. The chemicals have made her even more
prune-like.
The interior is decorated like a palm reader was the prior
occupant. The lamps have beaded fringe, the lighting is dim, there’s an icon of
a saint with four hands, palms facing front. That kind of thing.
“Sit at the table,” she tells me, calling from the kitchen
area. I sit. It’s a small, round, wooden table, like a fortune teller might
use. She strides in, her shawl waving wildly about her. She tosses a packet of
photos onto the table. “Seventy-five bucks,” she says.
I open the packet and examine the photos within. They are of
a teen boy, his Bar Mitzah. From the looks of the clothes, this happened some
time in the 1970s. “I have a daughter. She’s still an infant. And we are Roman
Catholic.”
“Oh, some people are very picky,” she says. I feel
uncomfortable not taking the photos. She has clearly gone to a lot of trouble,
making a dark room in an RV bathroom sink. I hand her an eighty dollar bill. “Keep
the change,” I say.
When I get back to the apartment I show the pictures to the
baby’s mother. “Oh, this might be the future! Do we have to kill the baby?”
I explain again that the baby is a girl, but she shakes her
head and rebuts, “What about the semen?”
I don’t know what to tell her. I had noticed something
strange about the baby. It happened the day before. The baby was crying. The
teardrops were too thick and cloudy to be normal tears. She was leaking seminal
fluid, impregnating herself. They won’t let us spay her until she’s six months
old. I fear that she’ll birth a litter
of subbabies, and I’ll have absolutely no time to make spaghetti sauce. And, on
principle, we just can’t have that kind of thing going on in this day and age. Bisexualism
is only suited to the invertebrates, a relatively well-known scientist told me
once.
“She’s still a girl,” I say, but the baby’s mother doesn’t
listen. “We are also not Jewish,” I point out. “These photos look like they are
someone else’s past, not our future.”
The baby is crying. And I notice that the sauce is burning. The
baby’s mother has been stirring the sauce every twenty to twenty-two seconds.
I huff. The day is not starting out how I envisioned it. Now
the baby’s mother is crying. She picks
up the baby and shushes her. “Okay, okay,” I tell her. “We can kill the baby
tomorrow.”
Copyright 2013 G. Arthur Brown
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