Baby
I
n the days afterwards, I would hurl awake from my nightmares, reliving the moment that he left. Each time, I was reminded that it was not just a dream, like I’d hoped. No, he was really gone. On the third night, I woke to soft mumbling noises emerging from the dark next to me. I couldn’t believe it. Had he come back? I reached out to touch the blank space next to my pillow, where his face would normally be. Immediately, I recoiled at the softness.
Wahhhhh?
My eyes adjusted to the dark. There was a baby next to me. It sat upright and round on the pillow, its giant black eyes bulging open.
I screamed. The baby burst into tears. I shut my eyes tight, willing myself to wake up for real. I took a deep breath, certain that I’d imagined it. There was no baby. I didn’t have a baby.
I opened my eyes. The baby stared back.
“Who are you?” I asked it. It made a gurgling sound, burping up a spit bubble. “You’re not my baby,” I said angrily, accusing it.
I turned on the lamp beside me, casting an orangey glow on the baby’s dotted legs. I poked it, to make sure its flesh was real, making a small dent in its thick ripply skin. The baby giggled at the contact, its thigh bouncing back into place—it was real.
I didn’t know what to do. I stared at it for a long while until it began to cry again. Then, I had an idea—I picked up the baby and brought it outside to my porch and left it there. It was mid-October and the air was crisp. From inside, I could hear it cry for a few agonizing minutes, then it stopped, and I was certain that this bad dream would be over by morning.
Yellow light rained in. Morning shook me awake in a crash, that second just before the roller-coaster plummets down. Wahhhh, wahhhh! The baby crying. I willed myself to stay asleep, in the warm, death-like, dreamy haze.
But the baby was crying and the sound was dreadful, drilling into my eardrum, piercing through each blurry thought. I checked my phone; I was already running late for class. I dragged myself out of bed and went over to see the baby. It sat on the carpet trying to pull itself up on its wobbly, doughy legs. The pain in its eyes and the way it smelled made me want to throw up. The sight was so terrible I had to look away.
I wondered if it did anything else besides cry. If its entire existence revolved around sadness. Like it was birthed from a bad, gloomy egg.
I decided it probably needed to be changed. I washed the baby in the bathroom with a kitchen rag. Then I left it in the tub and walked down to the drugstore on the corner of my street. I bought a package of diapers and wipes, some other things in the baby aisle that I figured would be useful. When I got back home, the baby was sitting upright, its tiny hands clawing at the rim of the tub. Its face red hot, wet with tears. I wondered if it did anything else besides cry. If its entire existence revolved around sadness. Like it was birthed from a bad, gloomy egg.
I looked at it a long while. The baby stared back. It wasn’t bad to look at—sort of pretty, even, with its giant white head and bulging dark eyes. Each of its lash hairs were long, black, fanned out, glossy with tears. It’s wide, fleshy face was blank, expressionless, its small mouth open in an O shape. An amorphous blob. But it looked a bit like him, somehow, some tiny bend in its nose, the shiny ball of white in its pupils. And a bit like me too, I thought, a bit lopsided, lacking symmetry. A gaping emptiness yawning over its eyes.
Later that afternoon, the baby proved that it could do something else. Miraculously, it began to talk.
I had tried coaxing it out of the tub with kissing noises, bunny ears, contorting my face into strange expressions. The whole ordeal made me squirm with self-disgust. All the baby did was cry in response. So I gave up and went to fry an egg in the kitchen.
The baby wailed louder at my absence. I ignored it, loading up the fridge with jars of applesauce, which I bought after realizing the baby might be hungry.
As I waited for the butter to melt in the pan, a gurgle sounded from behind me. I turned around.
Ug … ugleh?
The baby was standing before me. Standing. Its two marbled legs solid as pillars. It was pointing at me.
Ugl-ehh. It garbled, then giggled. Spit bubbling at its mouth. Ugly … It laughed distinctly, a soft, pitchy, baby-like warbling.
Rage flared through my chest. My jaw clenched. “What did you say?” I couldn’t believe this fucking baby was calling me ugly. Laughing at me. After I changed its diaper and wiped its ass and bought a case of applesauce to feed it.
It clapped, its two tiny hands smacking sloppily together, a look of pure joy on its face, like it finally understood its reason for being. Then it wobbled away, fell down, and tried to get back up. I watched it struggle, rolling back on its knees, until it went finally went still. Then the crying started up again and didn’t stop for several hours.
I completely forgot that I was supposed to go to school that day. I emailed my teacher and found out that I’d missed a quiz.
That night, I tried to dispose of the baby again. I wrapped it in a fluffy blanket and ripped an old sock to fit around its head, making a cap. It looked almost cute, bundled up like that. I brought it to the nearest fire station. It was a complete cliché, but I was out of options. I had to work early the next morning and needed a solid night of sleep.
I half-expected it to be waiting for me on the bed when I arrived home. But it wasn’t.
The apartment was eerily silent that night as I slept.
“Oat milk latte to go,” Juliette handed me the paper slip with the order. I nodded, looking down at my phone, scrolling past several text messages I had never responded to. Concerned friends, my parents asking when they’ll see me. I closed my phone and filled the steel pitcher.
After a moment, it clattered out of my hands, onto the counter, spilling oat milk across the bar mat. My hand throbbed, a red welt forming on my palm.
“That’s the third latte you’ve burned today!” Juliette groaned, wiping up the spill with her rag.
“I’m sorry,” I shook my head, pressing down on my hands. “I’m distracted.”
“Here,” she turned on the cold faucet, holding my hand under the stream. “Are you okay?”
There it was again; that faint, piercing, wailing sound, ringing at the back of my head. “Do you hear that?” I asked her.
“Hear what?”
“The baby crying.”
“A baby?” she turned around, scanning the seating areas before us. “I don’t see a baby.”
Waaahhhhh, wahhhh! It was getting louder. “Maybe it’s upstairs.”
Juliette sighed. “Why don’t you take over cash instead? I’ll do coffee.” She nudged me away from the espresso machine.
“I’ll just wipe down some tables first,” I said, fetching a rag and a spray bottle.
The crying grew louder as I climbed the stairs to the second floor. I knew it was here. It had found me.
I walked to the other end of the cafe, towards the bathroom stalls. I kicked open the last one. The baby was sitting on the seat, in a stained, smelly diaper. Its face purple with anguish.
For a second, I softened. I felt bad for the baby—I understood its despair.
I grabbed the baby by the armpits and lifted it to my face. “What do you want from me?!” I shouted. Under the sheeny bathroom light, its eyes looked just like his. “Why can’t you leave me alone?!” I shook the baby, demanding an answer. But it just cried even harder, its bald head turning so completely red that I thought it might explode. For a second, I softened. I felt bad for the baby—I understood its despair.
Then I cried too. The sob broke out of me from deep in my belly, and I fell under its weight, dropping the baby down, wailing into its small face. I cradled it against my chest as I cried, rocking it back and forth, holding its head in my neck. I cried for a long time, wringing some awful thing out of me.
When I was done, I held the baby out in front of me. It had stopped crying. Its dark, round eyes blinked. After a moment, it pointed at my face and giggled.
I tucked the baby under my sweatshirt and bolted down the stairs. I told Juliette that I wasn’t feeling well and needed to go home. I felt bad abandoning her in the middle of the day, but what was I to do? The baby’s diaper needed to be changed.
There were days when the crying didn’t stop at all, except for brief pauses when Baby needed to catch its breath before starting up again. I did what I could—I rocked it, shushed it, sung little whispery lullabies. I fed it sweet potato and pudding, miming airplanes with the spoon. Nothing would please it. I wore earplugs to sleep, stuffing in two at a time, but they barely muffled the noise. Baby was inescapable—its pitchy, piercing cry penetrated through everything.
Then there were days where it seemed possessed by an evil spirit. It bullied me, badgered me, mocked me, followed me around the house. It was learning new words with every passing day. Most mornings, I woke to the baby sat on my pillow, clapping its hands together, chanting, Stupid! pathetic! toxic! cunt! Followed by a cryptic, echoing giggle. Other times, I would wake to find the living room completely torn apart by Baby’s wrath. Pillow cases ripped open, dishes shattered on the floor, clothes thrown over the furniture, piss and spit-up all over the rug.
And soon enough, Baby began asking questions.
Where’s dada? It would ask me.
“You don’t have a dad,” I told it, as I scrubbed its vomit out of the carpet. But this response was never good enough. It kept pressing me. Where, where, where?
Its questions were grating, ceaseless. I jumbled up my words, changing my story each time. I told Baby that its dad was a famous rockstar, touring the country with his band. Or that he was a soldier stationed overseas, fighting a deadly war. Or that he was a secret agent for the government, working on an undercover mission. None of these stories satisfied Baby’s curiosity. It would continue to press me, asking, Why dada don’t visit?
When I couldn’t answer, Baby would throw a tantrum. Why, why, why!
I tried distracting it with other things, waving toys in front of its face.
Dada don’t love me?
Dada don’t love you?
Why he leave?
Why, why, why?
I went through phases. Some days, I was fuelled by seething hot rage. I was furious at Baby, this monster that entered my life and wouldn’t leave no matter how hard I tried to get rid of it. I slammed the door on my way out of the house, just to wake it up. I started neglecting Baby. I stopped feeding it, no matter how hard it cried. I refused to change its diaper. It was my only way of rebelling against it. Some nights, I dreamt of kicking Baby’s dad in the face with chunky platform boots. Pow, square in the jaw. I walked the streets, scowling, running from the sound of Baby’s wail. Looking for a fight.
And some days, I was desperate. I would’ve done anything to feel powerful again. I searched online ads for second-hand motorcycles. I stopped going to class, to reclaim some control over my life. I emailed my teachers, explaining that I had unexpectedly found myself in the role of full-time caregiver. They responded with accommodations for me, offering to have me complete my assignments online. Honestly, I was hoping that the responsibility of school would just disappear altogether, so that I could stay at home always.
I decided that I didn’t need to work anymore either, and called in sick several times a week. After a few missed shifts, Juliette called me.
“Where have you been?” she snarled into the phone. “I’ve covered for you all week.”
“I’ve been taking care of this baby.”
“What baby? Have you lost your marbles?
“Look, I’m dealing with a lot at the moment.”
“Well they’re gonna fire you.”
I figured that wouldn’t be so bad anyways. I could use a break from working. It wouldn’t be hard to find another barista job, or remote gigs online so that I could stay home. My other friends also stopped asking me to hangout. The texts came in fewer and fewer. They probably understood that I was no longer reachable, that I’d become too awful to be around, all wrapped up in my sad baby.
I started going out late at night, half-naked. I hung out in dingy dive bars, searching for giant, older men to fuck. I figured it was time to start moving on. One night, I picked up a burly man named Chris. He took an interest in me, or at least pretended to.
When I brought Chris home, Baby was nowhere to be seen. The place was a total mess. Empty feeding bottles, stuffed animals and dirty towels littered the living room.
He picked up a raggedy, lavender teddy bear off the floor, inspecting it. Baby’s favourite one. “You got kids?”
I shrugged.
He kept pulling things out from my sheets as we fucked. A pacifier, a package of baby wipes, a tangled cluster of tiny socks. He flung a blue rattle across the room. He sighed, growing frustrated, rearranging himself on the duvet.
He pushed me down onto my stomach, holding me still. Whispering dirty things in my ear. Then I heard it again—the crying.
I craned my neck to look behind him. Baby was standing in the doorframe, holding the lavender bear. Watching us.
Waaaaahh! Waaaaahh!
“What the fuck … ?” he slowed, looking down at me confused.
I realized the pillow under me was wet. My face was hot and damp. I couldn’t really tell who was crying.
He pulled his pants on quickly. He was desperate to leave, to get as far away from me as possible, and my weird, crying, smelly, clearly neglected baby.
A few weeks after Baby appeared, he called me. Asking to pick up his stuff.
Baby saw his name appear on my phone screen, next to me on the bed, before I did. Its eyes shot up, growing huge, its pupils manically dilating. Dada …? it gurgled.
I turned away from Baby as I took the call. But this infuriated it. Dada, dada, dada! Baby stomped its legs. I knew a tantrum was just around the corner. Its small, thick hands started clawing at my back, climbing up my shoulders. They dug into my scalp, pulling at my hair. Dada, dada, dada!
I couldn’t see him now. How would I explain Baby? So I told him that I had booked a last minute trip out of town and now was a bad time.
But Baby didn’t like that. Its fleshy hands whacked my head, over and over again, furiously slapping every inch of my face. Nooooooooo! it shrieked, I want dada! It burst into tears. I covered the phone speaker with my hand, but it was impossible that he missed it.
After I hung up, Baby gripped its small hands around my neck and squeezed tightly.
You’re bad! Bad mommy!
My vision fizzled and blurred as I gasped for air. For a moment, I was sure it would kill me. I slipped slowly into the sleepy fog. Death stretched over me like a hollow cave; I didn’t fight it.
Stupid, ugly, crazy, bitch! That’s why dada left you!
I woke later that night to Baby’s cries. They were especially anguished now, its humongous eyes so broken-hearted, its wails piercing through the walls, pouring out through the windows. Loud enough for everyone on my block to hear, for it to echo through the city’s air traffic. The cries rattled my bones, its grief so immense and striking that it seemed alien, born of a different world, clashing with my reality.
I plugged in my speakers and queued up “7 Words” by Deftones, angling them towards where Baby sat on the floor. I set the volume to full blast. The sound exploded out into my bedroom, rumbling the walls and the floors. Baby stopped crying immediately, its eyes widened in confusion. It blinked. Its face turned blank. It forgot why it was sad.
It giggled and crawled towards the sound. I smiled as it rolled over on its back. But as the raging chorus kicked in, a shadow loomed over Baby’s face, an imperceptible shift. And then instantly, it began to wail again.
The song rammed into my skull, the electric guitar scratching some deep, itching nerve. Baby glitched for a moment, its face fizzling in between expressions of agony and delight. Crying then giggling. I heard screaming, but I wasn’t entirely sure if it was the song, my own voice, or Baby’s.
The bridge rung through and I followed the bass drum. My head tilted sideways as I stared at Baby. Its face glowed, blurring, swirling out of focus. The bedroom was trembling, alive and beating, as though the walls could come crashing down at any second. Baby clapped. It cried. It stood up and began dancing. Jumping. And then I was laughing too. And crying. Watching Baby fall over on the floor.
Thankfully, time continued to pass.
Baby continued to grow. So rapidly I couldn’t keep up. Every day it seemed larger, taking up more space, its face expanding and moulding, becoming more human-like. After a few more weeks, it began to walk freely, waltzing through the apartment with ease. It wasn’t long before it was speaking coherent, elaborate sentences. Its questions persisted, too. Baby was becoming self-aware, desperate to understand where it came from, trying to piece together an origin story. The crying was dying down as well. There were still outbursts every so often, but they were mostly replaced by a general aura of weepy, insufferable sadness that clung to Baby like a dark cloud.
Then Baby grew even more. It started borrowing my stuff, disappearing for hours at a time, watching TV late into the night. One morning, I woke to the smell of bacon wafting from the kitchen, and found Baby measuring coffee over the pot. Then I came home one afternoon and Baby was reading my copy of Jane Eyre. It glanced up at me, “Oh, hey,” then back down at the novel. Later that week, the apartment started to reek of weed. I caught Baby in the bathroom, smoking a joint through the shower vent.
I realized I needed to go back to work, immediately, if Baby was going to continue growing at this pace. I called the cafe the next day and asked for my job back. They never responded. So I began frantically applying for jobs, and eventually, I was contacted by a neighbourhood bar who needed someone to cover weeknight closes. I started working long hours, finishing at 5 a.m. most nights. I was much too exhausted to care for Baby by the time I got home.
But Baby didn’t seem to need me as much anymore, I thought, as I watched it one morning, heading off to school or something, locking the door behind it.
With time, Baby stopped asking about its dad. And eventually, it began spending nights away from home. It never warned me beforehand—it would just disappear.
One day, I ventured to ask it, “Where do you go all day?”
Baby shrugged and responded, “Out.”
'Why do you hate me?' I asked it directly.
And so we lived like two roommates on less than great terms. We tolerated each other, said “Hello” if we both found ourselves in the living room. But we were perpetually annoyed with the other, some unresolved tension hanging over the apartment. One morning, when Baby was folding laundry, I approached it, looking at its face closely. I studied its nose, grown more sharp and refined, its red-flushed cheeks, the roundness under its eyes, the deep brown around its pupils. Baby squirmed away from my gaze. I poked its cheek; it batted my hand away.
“Why do you hate me?” I asked it directly.
Baby laughed, but it looked down quickly, like it was nervous. It scratched its upper-arms, something that it used to do before throwing a tantrum. Now, it just looked defeated.
“I don’t,” Baby said, then walked off.
My chest eased open. I didn’t realize how much I’d been needing Baby to say that.
Early one day, on my way home from the closing shift, I picked up fresh pastries from the bakery. Baby and I had been especially sour with each other that week and I figured a peace offering was due. But by the time I got home, Baby was already gone.
When I didn’t see it for a few more days, I started to worry something was wrong.
After a week of its absence, I began searching for it throughout the house, digging though its things, looking for clues. I spent the afternoon carefully washing and ironing Baby’s clothes, organizing its books and toys. I changed its bedsheets and vacuumed every corner of its bedroom. I cooked a batch of peanut curry and stored the leftovers in the fridge, in case Baby came home at night, hungry. I blasted Deftones at all hours of the day, hoping to lure it home.
Weeks passed. There was no sign of Baby. I wandered the streets searching for it, in alleyways, dumpsters, the fire station where I originally tried to dispose of it. I went back to my old job and looked inside the toilet bowl. I roamed my neighbourhood at dawn, after my shifts, calling for it: “Baby? Baby?”
But Baby was gone.
I got home one morning and sat on the bathroom floor. I stared at my hands. The yellowy outline of a blister from where the milk steamer burned me had now faded into a scar, deep beneath the surface of my skin. Baby had shaped time into a sinking vacuum around me, swallowing everything in its orbit. I didn’t even notice it pass. In the time since he’d left, I had somehow birthed a baby into my life, watched it grow up into a person, and watched it leave me.
I opened my phone and finally drafted a reply to his request. That yes, he could come collect his stuff.
After I pressed send, a key jangled in the front door. A sullen, ghostly child suddenly loomed past me, dragging bits of newspaper and pavement dust on its heels. There was Baby, chewed and spat up by the city, by the day giving into night. A blank, round face imprinted by so much sadness, it hardly seemed able to contain it.
It was silly of me to think Baby would ever leave for good.
I watched it toss its coat over a chair, pass a hand through the frizz haloing its head. Run cool water in the sink and splash its face, breathing slowly. Staring down into the glazed white of the marble sink, through the whirlpool of the faucet.
I reached a hand out towards it. I wanted to tell Baby that I had been worried. That I thought about it everyday it was gone. That there were leftovers in the fridge if it was hungry. That I was sorry for the time I left it out in the cold, in front of the fire station. That I was sorry for a lot of things.
But Baby wasn’t looking at me. It turned off the faucet and glanced up into the mirror, gazing at itself. Baby studied its skin, the sharp slope of its nose. Staring deep through its dark, thick-lashed, shiny ball of white, unrelenting eyes.
