The midwife wipes afterbirth from the baby’s forehead and rubs the vernix back into his skin. The mother lies back, breasts fallen slack at her sides. She does not reach for the baby, but for herself — arms curled over her emptied stomach.

The midwife gathers the baby into her sagging bosom and tucks the blanket beneath his chin. He quiets against her. A bead of milk gathers at her nipple. She smiles as it slips down her stomach.

The mother glances up at the bleached ceiling, eyes straining to focus.

Her gaze drifts down to her baby, nestled in the midwife’s arms. She had carried him inside her, felt the outline of his feet beneath her taut skin. He came from her. Still, she does not recognize him.

His eyes are open. She searches them for something — a spark, a claim, a tether — but finds only her own reflection.

She had imagined someone warm, milk-sweet, already hers. But this blinking being, with eyes too steady for a newborn, is something else.

She wants to touch him. To know the curve of his nose, the softness of his cheeks. Her finger trembles above his face. The midwife’s arm remains between them.

“The baby knows,” the midwife says, already turning toward the door.

The child nuzzles at the midwife’s shirt, rooting at the damp fabric.

Pressing a thumb into the tender swell of her stomach, the mother startles at its buoyancy — how it gives, then slowly rises again.

“I’ll see to him.”

Eyes closed, the mother listens to the midwife’s creaking hips, the click of the door.

Beyond the door, the baby does not cry.

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Originally published in Scuzzbucket. 

I always thought I’d end in water. It feels cyclical — a homecoming.

We are made in water, tiny bones and sheer eyelids forged in our mothers’ wombs. From the beginning, water accepts without question.

Then we’re forced into air.

No wonder babies cry.

I think this as I float in the tub. Float is generous — the water’s too shallow to suspend me, my thighs glued to splotchy acrylic.

I study the soap scum. It’s shaped like a dog. Or an old man, hand to his nose. A sign, maybe. That I’m taking too long.

I wonder what the old woman in Apartment C would think. Maybe she’d show up with one of her cherry pies.

Mimi — the only name anyone knows her by — says her grandkids love her pies. Jonah can down two in a sitting. Lexi used to like blueberry until she got self-conscious about her thighs. Mimi confirmed Lexi’s thighs are “on the larger side.”

Back bent over her red cane, Mimi would hobble through my unlocked door unannounced, only to find me — chubby and nude, chin damp, a half-eaten box of pizza resting on the bathroom sink.

Scandalized, she’d drop the pie, goopy cherries smearing across the tiles, folding into the myth of me.

She would retell it later to the rest of the hall. Cherry pie. Nude. Unshaven. The examiner mistook pie filling for blood on his shoe. The details would thicken. Sweeten. Stick.

The water presses lightly against my skin, reminding me I’m still here.

I reach for the washcloth resting on the edge of the tub. Its white startles against the dull metal beneath, like skin over bone. My right elbow overextends, knocking over my husband’s ancient bottle of Head & Shoulders, slick with white crust.

The bottle bounces once, twice, then bumps the trash can by the toilet.

Tampons stare back, their white strings hanging like tiny nooses.

The water’s gone cold. I shiver, my fingers floating just below the surface, puckered and small. Shriveled cherries.

Damn. I missed trash day.

Dying three feet from my tampons doesn’t sit well. Maybe it’s leftover embarrassment from eighth grade, when Mrs. Janis called them our “dirty little secrets,” or how Mom always entombed hers in toilet paper.

Maybe I won’t do this today.

I’ll wait till trash day.

Or longer.

Originally published in Scuzzbucket. 

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Popcorn smells the way sweaty hands feel. Greasy, tantalizing. A noxious wanting in the air.

My bag is half gone before the previews. My mother’s voice surfaces—wait until the movie starts—short-tipped fingernails tapping against her phone, texting the pool guy instead of silencing her alarm.

But today, I’m alone. My fingers dip into the sweating kernels, butter slicking my knuckles. It feels illicit, like hands slipping beneath floral bedsheets, searching in the dark.

The theater lights dim. I’m conscious of the popcorn entering my mouth, soft bodies pressing against my molars. I’m a delicate chewer, unlike my mother, whose jaw always seemed locked, kernels wedged between her front teeth the way she wedged herself into size-four jeans.

I press the button on the side of the chair. The seat reclines with a soft whirr. The ticket stub slips into the crack between cushions. I fish it back into my pocket without looking.

The teenage girl at the ticket booth chose the movie for me. She eyed me suspiciously when I asked, nose ring flaring beneath acne-pocked skin. After I paid and slid her an extra ten, her expression shifted. She came around the counter and took my elbow.

As we passed the concessions, a nasally man yelled, asking why she’d left the register. Her grip tightened. She pointed at my closed eyes.

She’s blind. Duh.

After five previews and a retro popcorn commercial where the kernels sang a jaunty tune, the movie began. A romance, I think. Timothée Chalamet is in it. Like popcorn, he’s another guilty pleasure. I like his mop of brown hair, his rail-thin body. In our wedding photos, I imagine lifting him—how little he would weigh in my arms.

Mother never liked my taste in men.

My junior prom date barely tipped the scale, with a belly-button piercing and a Sailor Jerry kraken inked along his ribs. Mother pulled me aside before we left and whispered that next year, I needed someone larger. Someone who would balance me out better. For the pictures.

Senior year, I took my cousin Jeff. That photo is framed above her kitchen sink.

I crunch a kernel and feel a sharp bruise in my tooth. Onscreen, Timothée cups a petite actress’s cheek and tells her she smells like rain. I touch my own face.

The ache moves into my throat. I swallow anyway.

Tom is going nowhere. Maybe the mall. Maybe the movies. One hand on the wheel of his Volvo, he lets fate decide. When the truck behind him rides too close for an exit, he merges onto the highway, humming a half-remembered song from the radio.

Up ahead waits a bottle shop—frequented by barely-legals with scruffy beards and baseball caps. Their girlfriends wear wide-leg jeans and monstrous Uggs, fur puffing at their ankles, making them look wolven. Hungry.

When was the last time Tom had been hungry?

Sheila’s brownies. But he doesn’t want to think about that.

Right now, Tom is thirsty, drinking like most men over thirty: too quickly.

He slides onto a sticky barstool and orders a pint. A man a head shorter and a decade older shoves the bubbling glass toward him. The kids call him Al. Tom does too. Al doesn’t mind—it’s his name, even if Tom didn’t earn it.

Instead of talking, Tom listens. He’s always been a great listener, according to his mother. His ex, Sheila, said the same—for the first three years. For the last two, she said the opposite.

Near the entrance, a small kingdom of piercings and peroxide holds court. Their alpha dominates—her Gucci belt cinching vintage Levi’s, her curves displayed like a cannibal wearing teeth. She struts to the jukebox and punches in Girls Just Want to Have Fun, smirking as she rolls her outlined eyes.

Tom pictures Sheila—arms waving like wheat, mouth reciting the lyrics as instinctively as prayer. For two months after she left, he blasted Lauper from the living-room speakers, letting the words repeat until they lost meaning. Between verses, he drank the blueberry wine they’d bought in Napa, tearing through bottle after bottle, peeling them back like old bandages.

Ever the gentleman, Tom insisted Sheila take the wine as a housewarming gift—for her new place, the one that was hers, not theirs. She declined.

“You like it more than I do,” she’d shrugged, packing a dying cactus and her adopted tabby, Sunday, into her sister’s Kia. Last went the mismatched baking tins she used for black-bean brownies and sweet-potato muffins. Tom still doesn’t understand how she made them taste like the real thing.

Tom shifts on his barstool, spine curved into an angry C.

Why was he here? Uptown bars suited him better—$18 martinis, men in sport coats, sweat-stained pits hidden under middling biceps. Chairs with backs. Places where he could meet a new Sheila—maybe a Cheryl or a Kathy—with crisp blonde hair and Pilates legs tucked under a fitted skirt. Women who baked lemon tarts and volunteered with troubled youth—a wholesome yin to his uncharitable yang.

For a while, he’d enjoy her company. He’d take her out for lobster bisque. She’d coax him into hot yoga. He’d eventually give in, admitting he should’ve listened sooner.

Eventually, she’d want to get married. Tom cringes at the thought of himself stuffed into suspenders, eating tiny shards of cake while his father shouts above his broken hearing aids, “What took you so long?”

But right now, Tom doesn’t want uptown, or Cheryl, or Kathy, or anyone. He wants to be here, among the young—where stagnation isn’t stagnation at all, just a soft pause no one has bothered to name.

Swallowing his third beer, Tom watches Al pour, bubbles sloshing over the rim like miniature tidal waves.

“You waiting for somebody?” Al asks, fingerprints blooming on the glass, bushy eyebrows raised.

Tom shakes his head. No. Whatever he’d once waited for is gone. In a Kia, no less.

Still, he nurses the small, foolish hope that somewhere uptown, the life he forgot to claim is waiting for him.

Until then, the pint is enough.

“Another,” he says.

I glance into the kitchen sink, already knowing what I’ll find: a plate and fork. I remind myself that rage over dirty dinnerware is ridiculous — and yet, molten heat still rises toward my throat.

Bits of food cling to the fork’s prongs, taunting me. Between clenched teeth, I seethe. My jaw clicks from the tension. I force myself to look away. It’s not worth it. But then, I notice heaping smudges of hardened brown icing lining the plate’s rim. That will be impossible to scrub clean.

My mouth snaps open, releasing festering heat. Her words spill out in a guttural whisper.

“Why does no one help me around here? I’m not the fucking maid.”

I flinch, startled to hear another’s voice emerge from my body. I grip the marble countertop, seeking stability. But instead of grounding me, my white knuckles become a portal, transporting me back to my childhood kitchen.

The elegant white Calacatta beneath my fingers morphs into outdated sandy granite. A tasteless tile mural of Tuscan grapes replaces the imported brass pot filler behind the stove.

She stands in front of the stainless steel sink, staring at the pink Barbie cup and matching plate circling the drain. Her red-taloned fingers grip the granite, making it bleed. My stomach flips. I want to blame my brother, but I can’t. The Barbie is mine. And she knows it.

I step backward, trying to retreat into the hall. I’m almost free when I slip on the medallion-patterned rug and catch myself against the fridge, palms slamming the door. Her gaze snaps onto me, eyes shifting — green to red to black. I duck, bracing for the volcanic spew.

“Do you know how hard I work to keep this house clean? Do you know what I gave up for you? You can’t even put your dishes in the dishwasher. I’m not the fucking maid!”

Her voice is relentless. It burns hotter with every sacrifice she names — her writing, her friends, her figure — because I failed to manage two simple dishes. Her words scorch my back as I crawl away, my knees cracking against the hard kitchen tiles. Third-degree burns spread across my skin, making it hard to breathe.

Finally, I’m at the end of the hall. Tears stream from my eyes as the heat fades, replaced by cold shame. I scramble into my room.

With my back pressed against the door, I collapse, grasping my hands until the color drains. Silently, I curse Barbie. The dishes. Myself. I sob until there is nothing left. Not even spit in my mouth.

The dryness time travels, an itch settling into my 33-year-old throat. I’m parched.

I walk to the perfectly organized cupboard, cups arranged by size and material. I select a blue glass, inspecting it for smudges before placing it under the tap. The cool water loosens my jaw, rivers of wetness flowing until I’m satisfied and the dryness is gone.

Gently, I place the glass into the sink, arranging it next to the fork and icing-stained plate. Now there’s a full set.

I wonder where my husband and I will go to dinner tonight. Maybe we’ll try the new Thai place. I call out, his voice echoing back from the bedroom.

I move away from the mess. Before I enter the hall, I pause, glancing back once more. Let them sit. Let them stain.

The dishes can wait.

A version of this story was originally published in The Interstitial. 

Baby doesn’t cry. Mama taught her that.

When Baby was four, she came home with wet cheeks. The girl next door had broken the head off her Barbie doll.

“That’s just how you play murder,” the girl remarked flatly, patting her Barbie’s head — still firmly attached to its thin, plastic neck. “If you don’t like my game, then just go home, crybaby.”

Baby carried the decapitated doll in her tiny hands, delicate as a bird. Barbie’s perfect arms and legs stuck straight up in rigor mortis, her plastic flesh hot from the afternoon sun.

She entered the trailer, blubbering. Mama was standing in the kitchen — which was also the living room — a cigarette perched between two plump, peach-toned lips.

Without a word, Mama picked Baby up like a feather and plopped her on the old wooden stool by the table. Its hard surface was sticky from the ghosts of breakfasts past.

Baby’s lip quivered as Mama inhaled smoke. Her red-taloned fingers silently took duct tape out of the broken drawer by the sink. She gripped the tape between her canines and ripped a piece, leaving a peach-colored kiss smudged on the gray.

Gently, Mama grabbed Baby’s Barbie, taping her head back to her neck. The bulky tape became an awkward scarf, at odds with Barbie’s glittery pink mini dress and stilettos. But still, Baby was grateful, cradling her plastic Frankenstein close to her chest.

As Baby’s tears dried, Mama spoke, her elongated drawl adding emphasis to each word.

“Tears are like pufferfish,” she said matter-of-factly, pressing her cigarette into the ashtray shaped like a wide-mouthed frog. “They make you swell up, ugly, and show everyone just how scared you are.”

Baby nodded and touched her face. Her red, bloated cheeks proved Mama’s words true. Mama never lied to her.

“Baby, you stamp your feet, stand up tall, and stare your enemies down. Because one day, you’ll be the one with the broken neck. And duct tape won’t fix that.”

Mama clucked her lips, nodded once, and told Baby to get ready. They were going for ice cream.

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A version of this story was originally published in Write Under the Moon.

There’s an old house up the block. I’ve never seen anyone enter or leave.

The porch is barren — no flowers, no doormat with welcome home printed in curling font. The unsettling emptiness gives way to the suffocating seal of the front door, shut so completely it looks like it hasn’t been opened in years. Maybe ever.

Round the corner, you’ll glimpse a side door, crisscrossed with red tape as if gift-wrapped by a child. The tape has never been broken — a kind of sacred salt circle for the inhabitant. No one goes in. No one comes out.

They say eyes are the windows to the soul. Windows, then, are the eyes to the soul of a home. These are bleary eyes — smeared with dust, threaded with spider legs, littered with dead leaves. Shades cover their irises, leaving the home blind to the comings and goings of the world beyond.

The yard is a patchwork of rocks, dying grass, and an old Chevy baked in dirt. Its windshield has been opaque for so long it’s forgotten it was glass — now a blackened shield, casting endless night over whoever might sit inside. If anyone ever does.

To a casual passerby, the place might seem abandoned. But there are signs of life, if you know where to look. Walk by after dark, and you might catch the dim glow of a basement bulb, spilling just enough light to brush the undersides of the unruly evergreens out front.

The vampiric house hangs inverted, like a bat — its inhabitant a bottom-dweller, head closer to the earth than the sky. He breathes into the walls only in the darkest hours, movements stilled again by sunrise.

You ask how I know the inhabitant is a “he”? I don’t. Maybe it’s the way the grass stays winter-dead, no matter the season. Maybe it’s the faint smell of rubber and soot drifting between the vinyl planks. Or maybe it’s just because men are lonelier — and more often left alone.

Tomorrow, I’ll find out. I’ll cross the uneven driveway, pass the barren porch, and face the belly of the beast — the tightly sealed front door. My hand will press against the wood. I’ll knock.

Maybe there will be footsteps.
Maybe the basement light will flicker on — morose code for I’m here. Leave me.

Or maybe nothing will happen.
And I’ll be left standing there, wondering if the inhabitant is peering through the dead eyes of the home.

Watching me.

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My neighbor is rail-thin, with knock-together knees and stick-straight red hair. Her eyes are her best feature — feline and watery blue. But their beauty is dulled by smoke, perpetually trailing from between yellowing teeth. The blunt pulls her in, deepening the hollows of her cheeks.

She’s got three daughters by three different fathers. On the surface, her life might read like a modern, sex-positive, female-powered Brady Bunch. But spend a day or two with her, and you’ll see something sadder: an anxious daughter of the sticks, someone who learned early that men leave, and children don’t.

Don’t get me wrong. She loves her daughters. They’re her everything — her greatest loves and, sometimes, her means to an end. She’ll fret about her youngest’s recurring ear infections in the same breath she curses the latest ex for not coughing up thirty bucks for gas.

She lives rent-free and doesn’t work. On a Tuesday, you’ll find her in a yellow polka-dot bikini and worn Adidas, packing her girls into the car for the community pool. She lost the key and can’t be bothered to get another, so she sends her wide-eyed four-year-old to our door in a one-piece and sunglasses, knowing we won’t deny a kid a poolside summer’s day.

Sometimes she’s salty. Sometimes she’s sweet. One day, she’s storming out the door with thunder on her face, yelling “fuck you” at her ex. The next, she’s all sugar, knocking on my door with a sack full of stuffed puppies and unicorns for my little girl.

Her mind moves sideways. One minute, she’s worrying about shoes for school. The next, she’s figuring out how to flip an old record she found for a thousand bucks. She’s not thinking about getting a job, applying for health insurance, or opening a Roth IRA. It’s survival or fantasy. The in-between — the mundane, the steady — doesn’t feel right to a girl raised on addictions and goodbyes. Too constant. Too slow.

Honestly, I like her.

I try to avoid her when I bring in the trash cans.

I wish her the best.

I wish she’d move.

The city never sits. It stands on swollen ankles, rubbing its tired back, purple veins rising up its skirt. Exhausted, it can’t rest — it must remain alert.

Boys turned men at sixteen sleep on its heels, caked in grime. Their pillows are gum from little boys’ mouths and spit from bigger ones in suits. Ladies leave heel marks on their hands — black-and-blue promises of fleeting attention, just enough to throw some dimes and forget.

The city’s stomach churns. Moneymakers meet up-and-comers in dim bars, swapping spit and fingerprints. Acid burns through starlets whose meals have been replaced by promises: five more pounds will make the difference.

The rich reside in its throat, savoring Victorian soufflés and brownstone brownies on pristine platters. But just outside, they’re shoving silk scarves in their noses, trying to block the sour stench rising from sidewalk cracks.

To the east, the city extends its arm. Red-eyed residents feel its pulse beneath their feet. Dishwashers, dancers, drivers walk its rutted veins, drawn in only to be cast out before sunrise.

At the edges lie the city’s fingers — cold and dead. Circulation is weak. Many come in, few make it out. The tired streets freeze first, thaw last. Old-timers wrap sheets around their necks, sucking ramen as radiators thump overhead. Too loyal to leave, they believe winter will end. Shivering in their shoebox homes, they fog the windows with whispered declarations of love for the city they once knew.

To the dwellers, the city’s creaks are as comforting as the greasy pie on 23rd. They shove it down, smiling as oil coats their throats. It tastes the same as when they were children — generations of grime collecting in their cores, passed from grandmother to mother to kin. The city is theirs, even if it’s hard to swallow.

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A version of this piece was published in Scittura. 

I practice the name he gave me in the splotchy bathroom mirror. AJ. Aaaaajayyyy. The harsh first syllable forces my cherry-stained lips to open wide, like the beginning of a scream.

AJ doesn’t suit me. It’s cigarette smoke — exhaled and forgotten. Girls like me need names that linger. Names like honey, forcing the tongue to slow down and savor every syllable.

But Peter doesn’t see it that way. “Sweetie, your name is beautiful; I just think AJ is easier to remember,” he says distractedly, using the mirror to smother the unruly cowlicks sprouting from his head.

He thinks he’s being nice, disguising the truth. But even if you dress a soiled baby in its Sunday best, it still smells like shit.

And the shitty truth is, Annaliza-June doesn’t belong in the city. It doesn’t flow from the tongues of Ivy Leaguers as they sip double espressos or casually slip from the mouths of art snobs in modernist museums. Annaliza-June is for doe-eyed debutantes wearing low-cut ballgowns from Belks. It’s for girls raised in shotgun houses with dumb daddies threatening 14-year-old boys with real shotguns hidden beneath whiskey-soaked mattresses.

Peter prefers AJ, which hides its secrets behind two finite letters. Its brevity is mysterious and, therefore, open to interpretation.

As AJ, I am an exotic flower, slowly unfurled to reveal the educated (on full scholarship, but we’ll ignore that part) NYU grad (it’s not Columbia, but at least it isn’t Brooklyn College or, God forbid, Long Island University) who spends her weekends cozied in bed, pondering the works of Homer and Virgil. (How unusual! How delightful!)

Annaliza-June ends the charade too quickly. Upon hearing my name, little alarm bells tingle behind their gold-encrusted ears. My subtle drawl prompts them to nod self-righteously, my voice affirming their saber-toothed intuitions. Ask where I’m from, and the game is done: Eureka! Two words — country hick.

It won’t matter that my grandmother (the original Annaliza-June) was a chemist who used her delicious mind to beat good-old-boys into submission. A feminist who defied the patriarchy by teaching rural girls math and science, giving them dreams beyond being groped at bus stops or serving over-easy eggs at vacant diners in their two-stoplight towns.

Instead of marveling at my empowered, progressive namesake, the city slickers shield their noses, blocking me out before they get a good whiff. No one breathes in deeply when they expect to smell shit.

So, Peter and the city have decided: I am AJ, the mysterious transplant from who-cares-where with an adorable proclivity for ancient philosophy and epic poetry. I have a mean backhand (on the tennis court, of course) and an affinity for Renaissance Portraiture.

Curated AJ wouldn’t dream of spending her nights in dimly lit country bars or the bed of a hay-laden Ford. She doesn’t make butter biscuits or pluck eggs from hens. She never worked at Walmart, nor did she sneak kisses with the pock-faced cashier behind the frosted glass doors of the frozen pizza aisle. These shameful stereotypes belong to Annaliza-June. And with her, they must stay.

I glance sideways at Peter as he joins me by the front door. His phone screen glows, revealing the time — half past eight. We’ll be fashionably late. He grabs my hand and twirls me around, a satisfied smile tugging at his lips as he admires his AJ. We leave the apartment without turning off the lights. Annaliza-June lingers in the hallway, watching us leave. I don’t meet her eyes as we walk away.

Originally published in Scrittura.