* — May 2, 2019
Minding

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“EDWINA HELD THE BABY upside-down and shook her til the Cheerios rained from her overalls. She did it briskly, three hard shakes by the girl’s ankles. Cereal dropped on the linoleum and made a delicate sound, like the plinking of fingernails against a coffee mug. Edwina hadn’t had her coffee yet, but there was some still sitting in the pot cooking down to sludge. It was after ten o’clock and the sun beat through the window over the sink and burned the damp off the dishes.
“That’s not a good way to hold an infant,” Rosalie told her. She was wearing Edwina’s blue terrycloth bathrobe and sitting at the kitchen table with her legs crossed. One bare foot kicked at the table leg. “You’re gonna traumatize her.”
“I’ve held more babies than you’ve got brain cells.” Edwina shook the baby one more time and the girl gurgled. Out came the Cheerio. It spattered on the floor next to the stove and lay there, wet and round, like a tiny glazed donut.
“There we go,” she said, sighing. “There it is.”
When she flipped the baby back over, the girl’s ponytail stood up frowsy from the top of her head. Her hair was very blond, the way that baby’s hair can be – the kind that almost wasn’t a color. The girl wheezed, but was breathing okay. Edwina didn’t bother shaking her again. The obstruction had passed.
“See? You knocked the sense out of her.”
“Shut up and hold her while I get breakfast.”
Rosalie took the baby and combed her fingers through her tangled hair. The girl sat pliable and quiet on the woman’s lap. Her overalls were askew from the jostling, and the little pink collar of her polo shirt stood up on one side and the point of it poked into her doughy cheek.
“She doesn’t talk much, huh?” Rosalie curled her finger around the baby’s wispy ponytail until it made a ringlet and bobbed against the girl’s neck upon release. “Quiet for a kid.”
Edwina poured the rest of the coffee in the mug she’d used the morning before. It was white and had a cartoonish apple etched on one side. An Apple A Day… In Dahlonega, Georgia it said on the opposite side in a bold, cursive font that made Edwina’s eyes hurt. There was just enough coffee to fill the mug halfway before the pot gave out. She snapped off the machine and pulled the milk from the fridge. She poured too much in her coffee and the rest she put into a jelly jar that she handed to Rosalie.
“Give her this.”
“Why won’t she talk? I got a niece this age and all she does is yammer.” Rosalie jiggled the baby on her leg. The girl sat impassive, mouth slick with spit and the gummy remnants of the toasted oat cereal.
“It’s fine, she’s only two.”
Edwina watched the girl on weekdays while her mother worked at the pharmacy a few blocks over. The mother was a slight, waifish woman with shoulders that sloped like a kicked dog. She was quiet and the only things that Edwina knew about her were that she lived in the neighborhood, worked at the pharmacy, and that she was fiercely devoted to her daughter.
She wore a white pharmacy smock with her name embroidered on the front in navy blue. She only owned one smock and the embroidery was coming loose from repeated washings; “Lizzie” was slipping into fuzz, like when the hair grew out on your legs.
Whenever she dropped off her kid, she provided a diaper bag full of clean clothes and diced fruit. Pears, bananas, grapes peeled and halved. Everything cut up and already turning brown by the time it arrived on Edwina’s doorstep. The girl never cried when her mother left, but the woman teared up frequently. I’m coming back, she said, every day. Promise I’m coming back for you, angel.
Edwina got out the box of sausage patties from the freezer and set them on the counter next to the sink. Did I buy these three months ago or six, she wondered. She spent most days in the house and they all bled together until she couldn’t remember when she’d last ventured out for detergent or toilet paper.
“I’ve been working on the railroad,” Rosalie sang to the baby, leaning down close to her ear. Her voice made the notes sound like they wanted to jump away from each other. “All the live-long day!”
Instead of cooking, Edwina sat down at the little table. She was the kind of tired that made the back of her eyes hurt. Taking a sip of coffee with one hand, she brushed Cheerio dust from the bottom of her bare foot with the other. She’d dropped the box when the baby gagged and the result had been an avalanche of cereal and crumbs that had mostly slid beneath her fridge and range.
“Thought babies were supposed to eat Cheerios fine.”
Edwina shrugged and reached over to swipe at some gunk on the baby’s face with her thumb. “It’s the honey nut kind. They’re too sticky. Clump together.”
She’d bought the cereal on sale even though she knew better. Trying to save a few dollars and she’d almost killed the kid. Outside a car backfired as it took off down the street and the baby, startled, made a noise like a fire engine about to begin its siren wail.
“None of that,” Edwina said, and pointed to the jelly jar of milk. “Give her some so she’ll hush up.”
Rosalie tipped the glass toward the baby’s face and the little girl settled down quickly enough. Edwina leaned back in her chair and twisted her neck side to side to work out some of the knots. She’d only met Rosalie the night before at Hotel Bar, but they’d had such a good time together she’d invited her to stay over. They slept curled around each other’s bodies, hands tucked neatly beneath necks and backs. Edwina supposed it made a pretty picture, the two of them folded together like loving puzzle pieces, but it had given her neck an awful crick.
“What’s that thing on your robe? A cow?”
Edwina looked down from her coffee mug to see the black and white spotted dog crested over the loose pocket at the breast. It had been an ex-girlfriend’s robe and she didn’t like it because it was scratchy and the dog had a face that looked mean. She’d put it on so that Rosalie could have hers, which was soft and from a department store. It felt like the chivalrous thing to do, to give up that good robe and take the one with the period stains on the seat.
“It’s not a cow,” Edwina said, and drank the rest of the coffee before getting up to take back the baby. “I gotta make breakfast. Go find something on TV.”
It was the right thing to say. Rosalie smiled and showed off a row of crooked front teeth that would’ve looked charming in a younger face. “Maybe we can catch the Price is Right,” she said, twitching the robe down over her bare knees.
Instead of setting the baby in the booster seat, Edwina kept her on her hip and performed the rest of her morning duties while she bounced her up and down. The baby had been coming over for a year and her cognitive development hadn’t shown much growth. Edwina worried that maybe she was stunted in some mental capacity, that maybe the girl’s mother had been a drinker during the pregnancy, but then she thought it was just as likely that the girl just didn’t want to do much. Edwina understood that. She’d been raising other people’s kids her whole life and didn’t care to do anything else. She’d helped raise her five younger siblings and when they’d grown and left the house, she’d just kept on raising other people’s kids. It made no difference to Edwina’s whose they were as long as they went home by five o’clock.
From the living room came the staticky noise of the TV. The volume was up loud enough it made the hair inside Edwina’s ears tremble. “You’ll need to fiddle with the knob on the front to get it to signal,” she yelled, and the baby started fussing again so she jiggled her a little harder until she quieted.
Toast, scrambled eggs, microwaved sausage patties sopping up grease from beneath a blanket of paper towels. It wasn’t the kind of breakfast Edwina would normally eat. She was a yogurt and oatmeal kind of person, but she’d had an unusual amount to drink the night before and was feeling low. In Hotel Bar, Rosalie kept saying, come on, one more, have another, and just have a little sip of mine, and Edwina had obliged far past the point of avoiding a hangover.

The baby kept reaching for the sausage patties. On her last attempt, she managed to snag the paper towel, letting it sail translucent with grease down to the floor.
“That’s enough of that,” Edwina said, and plopped the girl into her booster. She strapped her in using the little belt with the food crusted over the buckle and ignored the whining noises that rose from the baby’s throat once dislodged from her hip. It was a seat that had seen the hind end of many babies. Edwina had bought it at a flea market two babysitting gigs ago for a little boy with hair the color of pennies.
Chopping up the eggs and sausage with the side of a fork, she combined it all in a little blue Tupperware bowl and set the mixture in front of the baby on the table. The girl still ate with her hands, even though she was old enough to grip a fork. Edwina could’ve taught her how to use one, but it seemed like something a mother should do. She wasn’t getting paid to teach kids manners, is what she told herself, but watching the kid eat with her hands at two years old made Edwina feel like she was doing the child a grave disservice.
“Eat up,” she told the baby who brought two fistfuls of egg and sausage to her mouth.
Edwina chewed a corner of dry toast and examined her face in the shiny front door of the microwave. Her hair looked a little flat, so she fluffed it with her fingers, but otherwise she thought she looked okay. She rubbed at a bit of mascara that had caught in the corner of her eye and smoothed down the front of her robe.
“Can I have some eggs?” Rosalie called from the other room, and Edwina cracked two more in the skillet and set the heat a little low so they wouldn’t scorch.
She asked how the other woman wanted them and Rosalie yelled back sunny side up, which Edwina thought was cute because they looked like little boobs when you cooked them that way. She fried them in butter and watched the baby from the corner of her eye, who’d stopped eating and was wiping egg and sausage along the surface of the table in wide sweeps with her chubby arms. The girl did things like that all the time. Made messes like they were art projects.
“Stop that,” Edwina told the baby, but the baby kept spreading her breakfast.
Once the eggs were done, she slid them on a paper plate with some of the sausage patties and put the rest of the toast to the side with a little pat of butter. There wasn’t any more coffee, but there was some leftover orange juice in the fridge. She poured that into her empty mug and took it all into the living room.
“Where’s the kid?” Rosalie asked. She was lying on the couch with her feet propped up on the tufted end. She lifted her legs when Edwina came over to sit down and then she put them directly on her lap. It felt like they’d already known each other for a while, to sit so casually together and eat breakfast with barely any clothes on.
Edwina handed her the plate and fork, but held onto the mug of juice. “She’s still eating.”
“Is it okay to leave her alone?”
Lots of babies Edwina watched over the years gave her grief, but the girl was never any trouble. She didn’t run around screaming or cut up when it was time for naps. She wasn’t the kind of kid who dug through the medicine cabinet or got into the knife drawer. When Edwina was busy, she left her strapped in the booster chair. The girl sometimes fell asleep there after meals with her face pressed to the wood, waking up with a sticky line of drool on her chin and a bright pink circle etched in her cheek.
“Don’t worry about it,” Edwina said. She ran a hand along Rosalie’s ankle, which was thin and turned out like a deer. “We’re good.”
The two women watched The Price is Right and took turns taking bites off the plate. Edwina thought Rosalie looked even better in the morning light. The blue of the robe made her skin look pink and fresh. She was younger than Edwina, younger than she’d originally thought in the dank, reddish light of Hotel Bar.
“How old are you?” Edwina asked, smoothing a hand up her leg and tickling the inside of her thigh. Rosalie swatted at her while she struggled to sit up. She discarded the paper plate on the rug in front of the couch and got up on her knees to kiss Edwina’s neck.
“Not too young,” Rosalie said, and Edwina put her hand inside the terrycloth to caress the woman’s breast.
“Younger than me,” Edwina said, and Rosalie didn’t reply, she was too busy untying the robe. Not young, not what most people would call young, but too young for me, Edwina thought, before she bore them both down to the carpet.
Light streamed through the curtains and lit their bodies in warm, buttery stripes. Outside came the steady hum of a lawnmower chewing up grass. Edwina had lived in the neighborhood for over ten years and she liked the place well enough. The front yard was a mess of palm scrub and oak trees and a profusion of azalea bushes, overblown with pink and white flowers year round.
They threw a delicate blanket on the lawn that looked wild and pretty.
“Is this okay?” Rosalie asked. “I mean, because of the baby?”
Her hair was long, longer than Edwina’s; it fell down her naked back in a dark curtain. Edwina brought a hunk of it up to her face and inhaled. It smelled like strawberries; like the cheap shampoo she bought for herself at the dollar store.
“Be quiet,” Edwina said, then used her own mouth to shut her up.
The television blared. On screen, contestants spun a giant wheel to see who’d make it to the showcase showdown. Edwina kept one eye on the progress of the wheel and the other on the woman laid out in front of her. Rosalie was nice enough, Edwina thought. Maybe the nicest she’d met in a while. The last time she’d had a steady girlfriend was two years prior. The woman, an overweight blonde, slept with a Chihuahua cuddled under each armpit at night. One day she’d simply stopped returning Edwina’s calls.
“That’s good,” Rosalie said. “Keep doing that.”
Edwina pulled a strand of pubic hair off her tongue and watched a man in a Tic-Tac orange tracksuit spin against an older woman who’d already landed on the dollar. The audience yelled incoherently while the wheel slowed down, getting close to the glittery numbers indicating prize money. Edwina’s mouth slowed, too, directly mimicking its momentum.
“Are you watching TV?” Rosalie pushed against Edwina’s shoulder.
“No,” Edwina said, but then the man in the orange tracksuit landed on the dollar and the crowd went nuts. The man jumped up and down and then he did a cartwheel. Edwina looked at that terrible, lopsided cartwheel and laughed in delight.
Rosalie stuffed her arms back into the robe and Edwina put on her own, too. “I’m sorry,” she said, but it was no use.
“That was the rudest thing,” Rosalie said, dusting off her knees. “Just terrible.”
Edwina felt bad. Not so much about the television, which was an honest mistake, but about the fact a guest had to wipe off her bare knees after being on her living room floor. There was a lot of dirt and crushed leaves down there that Edwina hadn’t noticed before. Her house was a place where children crawled around. What was happening to the babies when they stuck their fists in their mouths?
“Sorry,” she repeated, but Rosalie had already left the room. Probably to get her clothes and leave, Edwina thought, and she ran a hand across the front of the television. It was dusty and her fingers left behind stripes that discolored the faces of the people in a laundry detergent commercial.
“Even bloodstains melt away,” a smiling woman said to the camera, pointing to a place on the neck of a white undershirt where her husband’s shaved chin had dripped. “Melts clean away.”
Rosalie had approached Edwina at the bar. The place was called Hotel Bar, even though it wasn’t located inside a hotel. It was down the street from a Motel-8 and you could watch the blinking vacancy sign through the plate glass windows at the front booths. Rosalie had seen the drink she was nursing and bought her another without asking if she even wanted one. They drank together for an hour or longer, huddled at one of the back tables near the bathrooms. Then Rosalie had put her hand on her knee; just a gentle touch, right along the kneecap, and it was enough for Edwina to ask her over.
“I can’t find my top,” Rosalie yelled, and Edwina rubbed her eyes until she saw bursts of fireworks blooming red and blue behind her lids.
“Hold on.” She picked up the paper plate and walked into the kitchen. It still smelled like breakfast and it made her feel hungry again, even though she’d eaten enough that she knew that couldn’t be the case. The window was open over the sink and she could hear the birds outside calling each other in high, agitated tones.
“The table’s filthy,” she said, and then she saw the baby was gone.
“I said, I can’t find my top.” Rosalie stood in the hallway that led to the bedrooms and the bath. She’d ditched the robe and stood there in her black pants and socks from the night before, crossing her arms over a white lace bra that hooked between her breasts.
Edwina listened to a bird make a sound like a question mark. The booster was empty. Its buckle, still crusted with food particles, lay over the side of the seat, dangling down and swinging lightly back and forth. The tupperware bowl sat on the table still half-filled with cold food.
“Where’s my shirt?” Rosalie said, rubbing her hands briskly up and down her goosefleshed arms, and Edwina told her to shut up.
Her kitchen door stood open. It swung wide, letting in the smell of cut grass and damp earth, and Edwina hadn’t even noticed. When had it opened, she wondered. When they’d been eating the food together on the couch? When she’d pressed her mouth against the other woman’s breast? Was that when the baby had gone?
“Where’s the kid?” Rosalie asked, and Edwina shoved a fist against her mouth so she wouldn’t start screaming.
It was still early, but soon it would be hot enough the concrete would burn the baby’s bare feet. The kind of hot that cooked earthworms on the sidewalk in less than five minutes. Edwina remembered something then. She’d brought the girl outside once when the weather was breezy, just to get her away from the television for a minute. The baby had looked around at the greeny-blues of the plants and the drifting clouds and the shifting, swishing palm leaves and her face crumpled.
Had the kid ever seen anything, anything at all, Edwina wondered. Had she ever seen anything outside of shabby rented homes. She tried to remember what it would feel like to see something so ordinary and experience surprise over it. Then the girl had shoved a handful of dirt in her mouth and Edwina had taken her back inside to watch television again.
Rosalie was talking, had maybe been talking for the past few minutes, but Edwina wasn’t listening. The woman walked away for a moment and then reappeared still wearing her pants and socks, but had slipped the blue bathrobe back on over her bra.
“Did someone take her?” Rosalie asked. “She’s not in any of the bedrooms or the bathroom.”
“Absolutely not,” Edwina said, but she looked around like she might suddenly locate a new body in the place. After all, she hadn’t noticed the door was open and she’d been staring directly at it.
“I’ll look again, maybe she slipped under one of the beds,” Rosalie said, and Edwina realized she was still holding onto the greasy paper plate. Edwina put down it on the table, covering the Tupperware bowl with its cold bits of egg and meat. Then she walked outside through the open door and shut it behind her.
It was very blue outside and the sun made her want to shade her eyes. Instead she let it slice into her pupils, staring hard out at the front yard and the bright green of morning. Her car sat leaking oil and throwing shade just beyond the coverage of the carport. It was starting to rust at the door hinges and there was a bare place on the hood where a large piece of gray paint had flaked up, making the car look like it had a bald spot. She walked toward it and ran a hand over the side, warmth creeping through her fingers and sinking into her palm. There was no one around. Nobody in the yards on either side of her house, nobody driving down at the other end of the street. No sign of the baby.
Edwina walked down to the end of the curb and stood there in her bathrobe. The birds had stopped yelling. She turned back around to stare at her house. Her gutters had spilled black gunk down either side and it made the place look like one of those white show dogs that always needed its face cleaned.
The azaleas were in high bloom, white and pink drifting into piles that lay rotting under the front windows. The week before there’d been hardly any, and suddenly the whole front of the house lay awash in a sea of florals.
“How do they grow so quickly,” she said, and realized she was crying.
It was morning still, but then would come the afternoon, and the baby’s mother would pull up in her small black sedan with the oversized car seat lodged in the back. She’d knock on the front door like she always did, no matter how many times Edwina told her to come to the kitchen door, and she’d call Edwina by her last name, Rutson, with a long Ms. in the front of it, spoken like she was hissing out the consonants.
Where’s my angel? she’d ask, leaning through the frame, like she couldn’t control the want of her body. Where’s my little one? Who’s ready to go home?
Edwina sat down in the dry, crunchy grass of her front yard. All those years watching kids and she’d never lost one of them, or had one snatched from her. She felt something bad well up inside her, like a fist choking her throat. Then she realized it was not an emotional ache, she was going to be sick, and she leaned over and threw up her breakfast in the middle of the lawn.
When she was done, she got up and wiped her face with the robe and looked down the road. One of the neighbors was yanking a big blue recycling can down to the end of their driveway. They did it angrily, in starts and jerks, like they were trying to punish the garbage.
“I need to call the police,” she said, and walked through the middle of the grass to the front of the house. The azaleas sat there decaying in fluffy piles. Her neighbor finished with the recycling and looked down the street directly at Edwina. He put up a hand and she slipped behind the tallest white bush and pressed back against the stucco of the house so he couldn’t see her.
The wind rushed through and whipped flowers from the branches. They floated down, spinning in fat clumps. Edwina leaned forward to press her face into the brush and the petals slipped along her cheeks like the softest fingers. She remembered the azalea bush in her mother’s backyard growing up. It held wads of brilliant fuchsia flowers. Nothing as sweet as the baby pink and white that Edwina stood behind now, but they had the same daintiness to them. The same tenderness. A single press of a fingertip left azalea petals bruised in seconds.
Edwina leaned forward until the bush swallowed her whole. The dirt at her feet was soft below the plant and it slid between her toes and made her want to lie down in it, to feel that warm earth over her legs, like being at the beach. She slid down the wall and knelt there, knees pressing divots into the fallen flowers, and when the branches parted around her she saw the baby.
The girl sat cross-legged below a mountain of blush-hued flowers. They slipped along her hair, stuck in the strands of her straggling ponytail. She held fistfuls of white and pink and stuffed them into her mouth.
“Oh,” Edwina said. “Oh, little baby. Sweetheart. Angel.”
She picked up a dropped flower from between her knees and ran the softness along the girl’s cheek, then beneath her chin. When the baby laughed, the sound of it was like the birds calling. Chewed bits of petal fell from her open mouth, gathering with the others already collected in the dirt.




Originally published in No Tokens Issue No. 8. View full issue & more.
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KRISTEN ARNETT is a queer fiction and essay writer. She won the 2017 Coil Book Award for her debut short fiction collection, Felt in the Jaw, and was awarded Ninth Letter’s 2015 Literary Award in Fiction. She’s a bimonthly columnist for Literary Hub and her work has appeared at North American Review, The Normal School, Gulf Coast, TriQuarterly, Guernica, Electric Literature, Bennington Review, Salon, The Rumpus, debut novel, Mostly Dead Things, will be published by Tin House Books in June 2019. You can find her on twitter here: @Kristen_Arnett and elsewhere.