Baby Talk

He was relieved to see that she was still fast asleep, her eyes shut, but her tiny hands clenched to her chest, in the fetal position. Just a little, harmless baby. It was hard to believe that he—a grown, 21 year old man— was actually afraid of her.

Careful not to make a sound, Neal picked up the tennis trophy and limped into the kitchen, using various pieces of the rental furniture to support himself. His left shoulder ached almost as much as his foot—every time he moved his left arm, he winced. Neal hadn’t even mentioned this to anyone at the hospital. But he was certain it was nothing but a bad bruise.

His foot, however, was another matter.

When he finally reached the kitchen, he went over to the sink and turned on the florescent light fixture mounted directly above it. He held the trophy under the bright white light and examined the broken tennis shaft very closely. It was caked with dried blood now, so it was hard to tell how clean it was before it had ripped through the bottom of his foot.

He scraped off a little bit of the blood. It was a deep maroon color and chipped off the metal in tiny little chunks. Neal turned the trophy one way, then another, to try and get a better look at it. As he did this, he noticed something new. The racket shaft was hollow—this he had noticed before, when he had tried to glue it back together. But now, something was plugging up the end. Some kind of “foreign matter.” He thought it was probably a piece of himself, a bit of tendon or gristle or maybe just skin. But it didn’t look like skin or gristle. It looked like dirt, like dried mud.

Neal frowned, his upper lip curling in repulsion, as he scraped at it with his fingernail. But this wouldn’t work. He needed something small and sharp to insert into the hole in the shaft...

He opened the cupboard and retrieved a toothpick from a little cardboard box, then held the trophy under the light again and scraped some of the brown stuff out.

That was when he noticed the smell.

Neal held the toothpick up to his nose. His upper lip curling again, he inhaled. He recoiled, staring at the little brown-smeared sliver of wood.

It was shit.

And not just any shit.

It was baby shit.

Neal dropped the toothpick in the sink, his throat bone-dry. He reeled for a moment, trying to convince himself that it might have just been blood or something else, but there was no question about it. He knew that odor very well, that almost-sweet fragrance a baby’s stool will emit for the first few months, when the child is consuming almost nothing but milk. Annie had (not surprisingly) made a special trip to the pediatrician about it, afraid that the smell signaled some kind of disorder.

“What are you doing?” Annie said, from behind him.

Neal was so shocked he dropped the trophy into the stainless-steel sink. When the heavy object made contact with the metal, it created a reverberating boom! that was so loud it made Neal’s ears ring.

Natasha started crying—she was cradled in Annie’s arms.

“I was just trying to find a way to fix...” Neal’s voice faded before he had finished his lie. He stared at the crying baby, fear rising in him like a rudely awakened animal. His daughter, that little...creature...wanted him hurt. Maybe even dead.

He remembered a documentary he had seen on TV about some natives in Africa who smeared human feces on the end of their spears and arrows to ensure that their victims—in this case, enemy tribes—developed serious infections if they were not mortally wounded. Natasha had undoubtedly employed the same principle here.

“What’s the matter with you?” Annie said. She was still staring at him, her eyes filled with fear. “You look...strange.”

Neal realized that he probably looked insane, his back pressed against the sink, staring at his baby daughter as if she were the Antichrist. But he couldn’t help himself.

He was terrified.