Chapter 2

The bare mattress creaked lazily beneath her as she sat up in the blackened room. On the nightstand a small clock blinked red eights, lighting the dark room in dim intervals. It had displayed nothing but eights for the past three months; she’d found it easy to forget it was there.  She swung her legs off the bedside, a thin quilt still draped across her upper thighs, and patted the nightstand blindly for some cigarettes.  The number of cigarettes she craved immediately after waking up always matched the amount of hours she’d slept.  She placed one behind her ear and another between her teeth and lit it as she walked the short distance to the kitchen.
     As far as bizarre pregnant cravings went, the strangest thing she’d wanted was extra salt on her eggs. Thus, her food selection was pathetically uninteresting. She swatted some limp hair out of her eyes as she crouched forward to look into the fridge, drumming her fingertips on the fridge door handle as she did. It wasn’t until after she blew a thick cloud of smoke over the top shelf, and grabbed a small 8oz carton of orange juice that she realized she was drumming the Reading Rainbow theme song, and found herself wondering whether or not the baby would ever know of the PBS show that had educated its mother so pointlessly one upon a time.
     Physically, her reaction to this thought was minimal. One raised eyebrow—the right one—and the slight slamming of the fridge door. Had she actually wanted to convey her annoyance, the padded door would have made a pitifully small amount of impact. But she did not want to convey anything; she quite simply wanted to keep on as though no such thought had sprung into her mind at all.
     To think of the future was, if anything, nauseating. It was ridiculously sensitive and wide-ranged. Her own future was one of the many subjects she had developed a great distaste for, and since her future was now paired with another’s, naturally, the distaste only increased.
     Pushing the small straw into the juice carton, the cigarette still fitted between her lips, she sat cross-legged on the blue corduroy recliner facing the deadened television. The sky was a shrinking shade of dark blue coming through the blinds by the front door. The news would be on soon, she mused as she tapped the ash into an old cup on the floor and sipped at the juice.
     When the TV popped to life, and the muted infomercials folded away, she waited for the early morning news to come on. She found this was the closest thing to a voluntary routine she’d formed in her time outside of work.  She read the closed caption scrolling up the bottom of the screen through the leftover smoke lagging in the space between her and the TV. The only sound in the room was the quick groan of the recliner as she leaned forward, her elbows poking into the insides of her knees, her eyes darting along the text as it increased along the screen. After two minutes of rapid reading, she tapped the remote and the TV sucked the light back and the screen deflated. With the recliner giving another sudden creak, she sat back and dragged from the cigarette.
     There was always this moment; when she leaned back in her chair, or walked away from the TV, and a different shade of unease fell around her. It was subtle, like an under the skin itch her nails couldn’t find, while simultaneously being all-consuming, as though she were walking through it and inhaling it all at once. It was the simple and unnerving truth that, one week later, she still had no idea what had happened to the boy. And while she would never admit the reason she found herself perched in front of the TV for the local news every day, multiple times a day, she still waited as nonchalantly as possible for the story of a young boy’s suicide.
     And when she was out of the petite confines of the apartment, walking with the grinding of pebbles beneath her shoes as she made her way to work, or at the grocery store standing in the lane which sold cigarettes and pipes, she would look down at her side, and just as quickly look away. It had become a habit, like knuckle popping, or nail biting, though much more expectant.
     She kept checking throughout her day as though the boy could spontaneously materialize beside her, as though he would show up just to reassure her he was all right. In her more ludicrous moments, she became frustrated that he hadn’t appeared randomly, seemingly out of nowhere, as he had that day. He seemed like the kind of boy that might wander into a Good Will to buy something with what little money he had, and yet as she stood apathetically at the cash register day in and day out,  scanning second hand item after item, he never passed through.
     In the pocket of her mind that constantly recognized the being within her uterus, there was also a particular newfound awareness, subtle though it was, that had formed since she left the dock that day. The awareness was that of a desire to see the boy and to make sure he was ok, and while this in itself was not that substantial, it was that in the small pocket of her mind she knew she was more concerned with the safety of the boy whose name she did not know, than that of her unborn child.
     Cross-legged in the recliner, her legs seeming to form a premature cradle for the baby, she rocked back and forth quietly in the dark of the small living room and slid the cigarette from behind her ear, the flame from her lighter vanishing in the dark a few seconds later.

Reviews

[Forist.johnston]

It's perfect.

[Jesse F Hayes]

Love. It.

Will leave some CC when I'm not eating pizza at the same time.