Amy Lyons

Issue 16

Flash Fiction

I’m exhausted all the time since giving birth and if I don’t get help soon I might disappear. My baby is light and I don’t want her to disappear with me, so I weigh down her carriage with bricks when we walk the vacant beach. The bricks are red, just like you’d think a brick would be, and the baby is pink, just like a baby. The beach has sand and ocean and empty beer cans. 

One day, my baby reaches over and grabs one of the bricks. She holds it up over her head and I can’t believe her strength. How is my baby fitting her pudgy little baby hands around this brick? This brick could crush her skull if it slipped out of her baby hands. 

“Baby,” I say to my baby, whose name I won’t reveal for privacy reasons. My baby deserves privacy and I deserve privacy, but we don’t get much privacy because I am Mom and must always be with my baby and my baby is a baby, who, if given too much privacy might disappear. “Put down that brick. It is not a toy. It is there to weigh down the carriage, so it doesn’t just float away.” My baby drops the brick over the edge of the carriage and it lands on my foot. Hits my foot on purpose, I might add. 

My baby has crippled me. Ever since this baby came, I can’t sleep, can’t do my job, can’t even get myself dressed in the morning without three cups of black coffee. The baby’s father is no help. He goes to work and holds the baby for fifteen minutes so I can scarf down dinner. And now this, a broken foot. As if a carriage full of bricks and a baby were not hard enough. 

My baby gets out of the baby carriage and stands over me. “Mom,” my baby says, “I don’t need these bricks. I am not as light as you think. I am substantial.”

I crawl inside the carriage and my baby takes me home. My foot throbs, but the pain is worth the thing I’ve learned. That my baby is quite strong. She can push a carriage full of bricks and full of me. There are two kinds of mothers in the world, good and bad, but maybe my baby, my strong, violent, difficult baby, doesn’t see it quite that way. Babies know things mothers have forgotten. I feel something growing inside me, something like a sacred truth.