Baby
Brandi Wells

I quit calling my mother, but she didn’t quit coming. She came at night, staring in my window while it was bright in the living room and she knew I couldn’t see out into the dark. She came when I was just sticking the key in the front door. She came when I forgot to lock the door behind me. She came all the time.

She liked to sit beside me and pet my belly, watch it rising and falling as I was breathing and my baby was turning. She petted it and crooned and smiled. I told her to go home, but she kept smiling.

She followed me to the bathroom and watched me piss, told me I wasn’t pissing right and I ought to piss better if I was going to be a mother. She watched the way I slept and woke me up to tell me how to sleep, how to lay, how to breathe. She told me I was going to kill my baby if I slept the wrong way.

I hid from her sometimes. It was ridiculous hide-and-go-seek, because I was so big. I held up doors and sheaths and grill faces in front of me, but they didn’t keep her. She found me and told me how to hide. She crouched down and crawled into the hot water-heater closet, folding her legs in and her arms behind her so she fit neatly in a little square under the shelf the hot water-heater sat on.

I closed the door and locked her in there with bars and tape and a chair propped under the knob.

I could hear her scratching at the wood and splintering it underneath her nails, but I kept her locked in there while I watched my belly grow. It grew while I was sleeping and eating and driving to work. It grew while my mother was scratching and coughing underneath the hot water-heater.

And when it was time for the baby to come, I didn't have anyone to take me to the hospital. I sprawled across the couch in the living room and gritted my teeth. When the baby was born, he cried. My mother woke up and she began singing, "Hush Little Baby," through the closet door. The baby hushed, grew up all at once and let my mother out the hot water-heater closet. That’s the last time I saw my baby.

Brandi Wells is a student at Georgia Southern University pursuing a B.A. in Writing and Linguistics. Her fiction can be found or is forthcoming in Thieves Jargon, Storyglossia, Toasted Cheese, Pindeldyboz, Dark Sky Magazine, and Monkeybicycle.