The following short stories are works of flash fiction I have written and published in the past year or two. All three deal with a mother's loss. May these stories inspire compassion for parents in mourning.
"Desert Storm"
This story was originally published in Whurk and So to Speak.
I did not lose the baby--she died. There was never any question about where she was. First she was inside of me and then she was in the toilet. She didn't hide. She didn't run away. I never had to phone a search party. When she called my womb home, I felt her. When my body expelled her like poison, I saw her. I always knew exactly where she was.
We did not try again for a year because that meant putting his cock where she had been last. Trying again would mean replacing her and I was still sorting out what had happened. One day I was pregnant and the next day I wasn't. I couldn't figure out the cause, only the effect.
He said I would be my normal self again if only I said yes. But I kept saying no, and soon he was the one who would break down sobbing because blue-veined cheeses go with gin and stout, didn't I know that? Or the lint roller belongs in the top left drawer, so why was I putting it in the top right?
The first time we embraced in all those months was right after I downed too much Moscato because I had grown cheap and childish. Even though his first thrust was hesitant and shy, I thought he had punched my cervix. When I squirmed, he dotted my forehead with kisses and I froze. The next thrust was faster, bolder. Each thrust went harder, deeper. A voice told me to lunge for his neck, so I heeded the call and bit him like in the old days before she died. He bit me back. At one point we established a rhythm, an understanding. The last thing I remember before falling asleep was suppressing a tiny burp that tasted like semen and sweet wine.
The next morning, I did my hair. I did my make-up. I put on my most beautiful Oscar de la Renta. I left the house and I walked the way elegant people walk in old movies. I noticed birds and sunshine and little white flowers pushing out from the sidewalks of Washington. I even noticed little boys playing catch in their front yard without cringing. It was Tuesday in Tenleytown and I headed to Chevy Chase on foot. I joked that I wouldn't get there until Thursday and had a real chuckle. Not a polite one. An actual chuckle.
He and I got into the beautiful habit of making love. We left hickeys with no remorse. We wrote notes to each other and left them for each other around the house. We said fuck it to cheese and wine pairings and had what we wanted. And then one day, the test came back positive.
"When will I feel the baby?" I asked the doctor several weeks later, wringing my hands.
"Soon," he said and smiled.
"No," I said, suddenly realizing how small my voice sounded. "Why haven't I felt the baby yet?" I met my husband's eyes. He looked away.
The doctor clasped my hand and said slowly and firmly, "Your baby is healthy."
On his way out the door, he patted my husband's shoulder. I sighed.
The next night, January 16, 1991, we were watching TV after dinner. ABC News correspondent Gary Shepard was on the air, reporting live from Baghdad, where the city sat in silence. Suddenly, at 6:35 p.m., Shepard said, "Peter, I'm looking directly west from our hotel now, and throughout the entire sky there are flashes of light." Then came the sound of tracer fire.
I almost turned to my husband and cried that the war had started when the quickening occurred. It felt like the baby was brushing a fluttering butterfly against my belly.
"She's kicking!" I cried.
"Panda"
This story was originally published in Animal.
Woodley Park was a hot lamp in the summertime and the tourists were all moths. They flocked to the leafy, upscale neighborhood for the zoo, or, more specifically, for the pandas, even when the panda exhibit closed to celebrate the birth of twins. But it wasn't just the tourists pressing their noses up to the glass. Washingtonians also were overcome with panda fever, just as I, a soon-to-be new mother, had experienced baby fever a year earlier. The panda exhibit was a shrine; 11 months before, my marital bed was a shrine and Drew and I made a daily pilgrimage. When the exhibit was open, you could wait in line for two hours for the privilege of watching the pandas roll over, swat at flies, or gnaw on a bamboo shoot. When I began to show, I could wait for days for Drew to touch me. Baby fever had cooled into a waiting game.
I wasn't so much amused by the pandas as I was the city's enthusiasm for them. It distracted me on those days when I was dizzy, vomiting, and achy. The mania thrived beyond Woodley Park. Children roamed the National Mall, Chinatown, and Capitol Hill wearing panda hats and T-shirts with as much zeal as Justin Bieber fans. The year before, when the topic of changing the Washington football team's racist name became a national debate, many Washingtonians suggested the team be called The Pandas. But who really wants to be named after a lethargic, oversized raccoon that can't even effectively perpetuate its own species?
When Mei Xiang's tentative pregnancy announcement aired on the news, Drew and I were sitting in the kitchen, eating microwavable chicken sandwiches and canned green beans. It had been 100 days since the female panda was artificially inseminated and, despite performing an ultrasound, zoo veterinarians couldn't tell if Mei Xiang was pregnant or pseudopregnant.
Drew rose to clear his plate. As he walked back from the sink, he called pandas "lazy teddy bears," absentmindedly patting my swollen belly as he explained that the panda reproduction program was "a waste of federal spending."
"If they're an argument against evolution," he said, "why would God invent a creature too stupid to get it on? Pandas are just as much an argument against intelligent design. Talk about survival of the dumbest and cutest."
I was reading an article in BBC World claiming wild pandas and captive pandas are, behaviorally speaking, two completely different animals when I went into labor three months too soon. It was the same day Mei Xiang popped out the first of two cubs. Like Mei Xiang, I didn't know I had been carrying twins.
Despite the hubbub, no one is particularly enamored of newborn pandas. They are pink and wormlike with tiny white hairs not unlike the scraggly roots that spring out from a turnip. The public expects them to fluff up and fatten up into scampering cartoons, but it doesn't happen in a week--and one of Mei Xiang's cubs lived less than that. When panda mothers give birth to twins, they are known to favor the stronger cub over the weaker one, often resulting in the snubbed cub dying. The naturalists at the zoo thought they could trick Mei Xiang into loving her cubs equally by alternating them. That way, she would spend as much one-on-one time with the weaker one as the stronger one.
Newborn humans aren't as adorable as we'd like, either. I don't remember holding my son and daughter after they were born, but I do remember watching them in their incubators. That's when I finally got a good look at them. With their crinkled alien features, they hardly resembled the models in Baby Gap commercials. Yet for all their lack of pinchable chubbiness, I loved them.
Neither was prone to adorable wiggling, either, but I loved them. In fact, they barely moved except to breathe. Yet my son moved even less than my daughter. He also was much smaller, redder, and more wrinkled. Without the nurses telling me, I knew he wouldn't survive. The realization came on Day Three, right as the credits for Judge Judy were rolling. On Day Four, I witnessed him draw his last breath. When I looked up from his tiny body to pray or curse God--I can't remember which--the television caught my attention. The weaker panda cub had died.
In the future, humans will have found the cure to mortality. Maybe if my children had been born a thousand years from now, they would have lived forever. Maybe in a thousand years, pandas will no longer rely on humans to propagate. Or maybe then, pandas will be extinct. But no matter how many years pass, my daughter will never have a brother and my husband and I will never have a son. We are too heartbroken. Mei Xiang will try again, or at least she will succumb to mankind's intervention. I will raise my daughter and, once in a while, I will take her to the zoo, but I'm not sure she'll ever see a panda. At least not with me by her side.
"Copied"
This story was originally published in Every Day Fiction.
When you died, I made copies of your portrait. It was 3 a.m. at the 24-hour copy shop and I smelled like someone had dumped an entire bottle of Burt's Bees bubble bath on me because that's exactly what I did to myself when you popped out from between my legs. You were a jellybean. You were so pink I could've eaten you. Placed you on my tongue and savored you. To bring you into my body again. Make us two beings in one again. Then we would've been Mommy and baby splashing in the tub. Dream Daddy might've swooped in with a rubber ducky or toy ship. The perfect scrapbook moment.
Instead the olive green sweats from my fat days were barely staying on my hips and my huge Hanes Her Ways were bunched up to my belly button. Maybe I had lost weight too quickly, I nagged myself, tugging at my baggy T-shirt with "Save the Ta-tas" printed across the front. I had on no makeup. I had on no bra. All I had on was a base layer of grief and an overcoat of nostalgia. The one cashier on duty pretended not to stare when I hobbled over to the copier. Since there were no other customers, I took center stage. Gaze upon my sadness, boy. Gaze upon this once-upon-a-time mother and her hands turned raisins from four hours spent in the tub.
When I nodded at the cashier, he nodded back. He was sallow and heavy-lidded. Otherwise, he might as well have been a cardboard cutout behind the counter. I didn't register any of his other features. Instead, I wanted to imagine yours.
I had always hoped that you -- or whichever baby came along -- would have my mother's dimples and almond eyes. Your father wasn't a particularly handsome man, but, still, I wanted you to have his height, his freckles, and the laugh I once heard daily. Most of all, when I looked at you, I wanted to know that you were mine. I didn't want there to be a mistake at the hospital. I didn't want you to spend eighteen years in someone else's home. If you made the front page of the newspaper, it would be for an award or a good deed, not some scandal.
All those musings were old, of course -- three decades in the making, renewed this evening. When Lionel Richie blared on the radio, he reminded me that you were gone. The real scandal was that your death would never make the newspaper. You would never win an award or perform a deed of any kind. No one would ever take your headshot or your mugshot. You had had no hair, no lips, no chin, no distinguishing features at all. If you resembled your grandmother at all, then you resembled her prenatally.
If.
I had no photos to compare. You were a two-centimeter chunk of raw chicken breast drenched in blood. Something tells me your great-grandmother -- a woman who only hung paintings of flowers on her walls -- wouldn't take or keep such photos, even if she could. When Grandma was conceived, the ultrasound hadn't even been invented yet.
But in the sonogram, there was no blood. You were black and white, which meant that I could fill in the colors. I could choose your dreams. I could paint the life that would have been.
I stood back and watched the paper shoot out of the machine, sheet by sheet by sheet. Through the copier's beeps, I asked God why your father had gone out of town this weekend. Even though this was a man I now knew mainly through the Powerpoint printouts he left on the breakfast counter, his presence would've meant not losing you alone.
The past couple of years, he had hustled for promotion after promotion so we could ready our nest for you. We made love in between presentations and meetings and deadlines. In those 26 months we tried for you, we watched Britcoms and held hands until I finally gave in and rolled over. Now I had to tell him that instead of rolling over all those times, we should've just watched another episode of Fawlty Towers. We barely discussed the weather -- except when it might change his commute or delay a business trip.
Maybe I would call him in the morning. Maybe I would just wait until he came home. Maybe I'd mutter something during the credits of Are You Being Served? These days, I no longer rolled over. One TV show after dinner was never enough and conversation was too much.
When the copier spat out the last image of you, I pressed three hundred printouts to my chest. The cashier nodded as I walked out. Then I headed to the car in a daze.
Once home, I went straight for the kitchen drawer and grabbed two rolls of tape. I inched toward the nursery because it scared me. Yet when I got to the doorway, all of the teddy bears comforted me. I sat down in the rocking chair with a green bear motif. Another one with blue bears faced the window. One for me, one for Daddy or Grandma. I rolled two tape doughnuts for the first sheet of paper and then stuck you on the wall. I repeated the action three hundred times. You replaced the teddy bear wallpaper.
Dark as it was, the room became a womb. I was inside of you, just as you had been inside of me. I would sleep and maybe when I woke up, you would be born, and your father would be somewhere in the stars. Genesis with no Adam. We would be blind for four days until we saw the sun. Then life would really begin. But we'd have to be quiet and wait for our Eden.