The Baby's Mother— by Alex DiFrancesco

It began with a drop of blood.

She hadn’t been thinking. In fact, she hadn’t been sleeping or eating. It had been seven months since her last hair appointment, when she had gone, globe-stomached, and sat in a chair feeling the knead of the hairdresser’s fingers on her scalp as The Baby’s kicks thrummed against her, casting bumps on the smooth expanse of her flesh. It had been seven months since she dreamed. In seven months, she had not closed the bathroom door. In seven months, she had not bathed on her own.

When she picked up her cheap, pink plastic razor and put it out of The Baby’s reach as they both sat in the lukewarm bath, she grabbed it by the head instead of the handle, and it slipped in her soapy fingers. The blood beaded, bright and warm on the tip of her index finger. She raised her hand to her mouth, her lips pursed. Then The Baby pulled her arm, his demand for her, all of her, each second of her, constant. Before she could stop him, The Baby had slipped the bloody finger in his own mouth and pulled with his tongue and lips, as he did on her breasts more times a day than she would’ve thought he ever needed.

The Baby smiled as she slid her finger back out of her mouth and raised it in front of her face. The blood was gone, though the cut was still there. It was as if the shallow slash had been sucked dry.

*

There was something different about The Baby when he woke up the next morning, warm and soft next to her own warm and soft body. His wispy hair seemed to have grown longer, thicker, fuller. His large blue eyes were wider, more alert to movement. His babbling seemed more like words, though they were words she did not understand any more than his previous noises. But he seemed to be speaking rather than enjoying the sounds that came from the shapes of his cupid’s bow mouth.

She was delighted at his sudden acceleration. She was his mother. She would do anything for his happiness to ensure his development was right.

*

The Baby was seven months old, and in addition to his suckles at her breasts, he ate small things, Os of cereal, mashed fruits, and vegetables, crackers. For thrift’s sake – they were far from rich – she pureed most of the foods herself. The Baby’s sessions at her breast grew longer, and sometimes she wondered if there would be anything left inside her when he finished.

One day, she was slicing sweet potatoes to boil, to mash, to help spoon into the dark cavern of his tiny pink mouth. In an inexpert flick of her wrist, she caught the tip of her thumb. The tip-of-the-sphere of it laid on the counter as the blood ran. Abstractedly, she thought of cleaning it. It could wait. She scooped the potatoes, thumb tip, and what blood came with them into a pot of water, where she boiled them all. While the food and the piece of her skin boiled, she cleaned and bandaged her finger. When the boiling had reached its peak, and the potatoes were soft, she strained the whole thing and mashed it. The piece of thumb was lost in the fluffs of xanthous-shaded food.

That day, The Baby ate everything. There was nothing spilled on his tray, nothing left on his chin or cheeks. He ate it all.

The next morning, he seemed to have grown overnight. His elbows were dimpled deeper and his legs longer. His pudgy stomach was flatter and longer as if his torso had been stretched.

Rapid growth was natural in infants, she told herself. Her Baby was doing well.

*

At eight months, her milk began to dry, and The Baby grew teeth. She slept less, as his own sleep was interrupted by the pain of teething. The world seemed fuzzy around her as if swaddled with cotton. The Baby cried. The Baby cried. She rubbed ice on his gums and gave him ice pops. When he suckled at her breasts, she sometimes cried with pain. And when her milk began to dry, he suckled harder.

She worried for he did not eat as he had a month ago, forgoing his mashes and purees, splashing them across his bare chest, over the tray of his chair, on the floor. She began to worry he would starve. He was growing, slowly, but she recalled the day with the blood, the day with the tip of her finger. How his growth had come thick and fast in the days after.

One day, while she was trying in vain to nurse him, she stood with him still latched to her breast. She walked to the kitchen. She took out her sharpest knife. The slit she made above the left nipple, the nipple he was latched to, was just deep enough for his nascent teeth to gain purchase around it. With his teeth, he wormed into the slit, nestling deeper. When her nipple was in his mouth, detached from her body, he chewed and swallowed.

Her breasts were useless now, as the milk had all but dried, but it didn’t matter – her body was no longer hers alone. That night The Baby slept all night with no pain, and in the morning, his teeth were fully grown in his mouth.

*

At eight months, The Baby walked, toddling steps on legs that bent and wavered beneath him. Still, he walked. He didn’t stop walking. He walked from one side of the ground floor to the other. He walked through the kitchen, through the living room, and into the bathroom.

Her mother came to visit from a few towns away, as she often did.

“He’s…so big,” her mother said. “Growing so fast. Maybe it’s a hormonal thing. You should check with his doctor.”

The doctor checked The Baby’s blood, though The Baby screamed when the needle sank into his flesh. His hormones were balanced. He was just a big child.

At nine months, he leveled his eyes at her when he called her “Mama.” Sometimes he tilted his head to the side, like a small dog, clearly recognizing her as he spoke. It was beyond what the baby books expected at this age, any of them. She was delighted.

At ten months, the growth he’d so excelled in began to atrophy. He stayed silent in his crib. He regressed to a crawl when he wanted to get from place to place. He looked at her as if he was in pain, sometimes, and there was nothing she wouldn’t have done to stop that pain. What had happened? The doctor had no answers, her mother had no answers, and the books had no answers.

But she remembered the growth and the blood and the fingertip and the nipple. She began to take inventory of her body. Which parts could she spare and still care for The Baby? Would a finger be too great a loss for her cutting and cleaning and changing of diapers? Would a stretch of skin from her stomach be noticed or her leg? In the end, she decided a toe might cause her to lose her balance a bit but would ultimately be of no great loss. The bone cracked beneath her kitchen knife. The baby toe bled, and The Baby dragged himself into the bathroom where she’d closed the door, not even all the way, for just a second, to perform the act of severance. The Baby’s pudgy hand slapped in the small pool of her blood as she attempted to cauterize the wound with a lighter. The Baby lifted his fingers and licked them, one, the next, the next, all five as if they were covered in cake batter or cookie dough. He licked his palm. She cried a little, the tears splashing down in the blood. They thinned it just a little, and the Baby slurped the rest from the floor. And then, finding the toe in the puddle, he popped it in his mouth and chewed with the strength of new teeth, all the way through the tiny bone.

The Baby smiled. The mother smiled through her pain.

*

His hair grew thick. His eyes shone from his head. He spoke so many words now, five, fifteen, more than she could count. Not all of them made sense, and not all of them were correct, but the words flowed out of his mouth. The Baby didn’t command her, even though he never stopped speaking. She was his mother, and The Baby knew she would always do her best for him without direction.

Sometimes he screamed. Despite his developing language skills, his emotions still took over again and again, and when he was angry, he didn’t get the toy he wanted, when he was bored, or when she wouldn’t let him do things that she knew were dangerous to his tiny (but growing) body, he would throw back his head and bellow. The Baby, it could be said, was tyrannical in these moments. He used a stream of profanities as tears streamed from his face. The words didn’t make sense (“fuckgosh,” “shitdip,” “assblock”), but he screamed them in his mother’s face, and she sometimes cried. Everything was so unclear. Her sleep was not even hers, punctuated by demands from The Baby, who toddled through the night, moving from place to place, picking up toys and knick-knacks.

One day he was screaming, and his words went. He went back to babbling. He was now eleven months old, and he should be advancing, not regressing. But the mother knew this had happened before. Baby’s development – who could understand it better than their own mothers, the ones who slept next to them, the ones who brushed their hair and brushed their teeth and looked into their precious eyes every minute, every second – no second was her own. Nothing was her own, not her hand, not her foot, not her nose, not her cheek, not the chunk of flesh from her thigh, not the chunk from her ass, not the chunk from her stomach. The blood was greater than before, but The Baby was growing faster and faster now, up to her waist, what waist she had left, which wasn’t hers anymore – it could hardly matter now.

*

When her mother came to the door, there was no answer. There were no cries from a crib. There were no promises to be at the door, just a second, just a second. There was nothing.

She peeked in the window. She couldn’t see much in the dimness. She did not see her daughter, and she did not see her grandson. She thought – for a second – that she saw a figure as tall as a man walking in hesitant steps, like a drunk, like a giant child. But that could not be.

They must be out, she thought. And what a perfect day for it, a spring day, a good day for a walk, for a trip to the park.

It was such a nice day to do something for one’s self. She hoped her daughter, The Baby’s mother, was enjoying it.

AUTHOR BIO

Alex’s work has appeared in New York Times, Washington Post, Tin House, and more. They are the author of Psychopomps, All City, and Transmutation.

Alex can be found on twitter @DifrancescoAlex