Melissa Bowers
1.
When the Cheerios spill all over the sidewalk, Celia thinks of being pregnant, how less than a year ago she wouldn’t have been able to bend down to pick them up. She’s only six weeks this time and memories have already started surging back in suffocating waves: Vomiting at the sight of raw chicken. Exhaustion to the point of insomnia. Heartburn and headaches and swelling. It’s still early. You never know—she starts, but Celia won’t allow herself to finish that thought, not yet, not when its magnitude eclipses everything else.
It really doesn’t make sense. She and Warren had managed to wrangle all three kids to bed before 9 p.m. once—one time, to celebrate his forty-first birthday—and her period hadn’t started back up postpartum, plus she’s still breastfeeding the baby, which means nothing is fair and her hormones are clearly betraying her. Stop it—of course she loves the children. Of course she knows that later, after everyone is tucked in for the night, she’ll creep into their rooms and study their eyelashes and press her lips against their cheeks and breathe the them-smell of their hair, but she was just laid off last month and Warren’s father is in the hospital again and right now Celia is sinking.
Celia keeps track of the stroller, one hand holding it steady as she crouches to collect the cereal that hasn’t already tumbled down those steep San Franciscan hills, and because he’s lost his snack and also because he is no longer in motion, Jack begins to wail. Beside them, Zoe plops her diapered bottom onto the ground, scooping fistfuls of filthy Cheerios into her mouth.
“No no,” Celia says, but the toddler doesn’t listen. Still holding tight to the stroller’s handle, Celia appeals to her first grader instead: “Please Helen, will you get her to stop?”
A few pedestrians, mostly men, step pointedly around them on the sidewalk. Jack’s screams rise to an embarrassing decibel. When Helen moves toward Zoe, her light-up sneakers crunch her sister’s fingers flat, and now there are two sets of cries.
Celia does not remember silence. She can no longer imagine the existence of a complete, singular sentence uninterrupted, even inside her own brain. During these moments and so many others—soothing 3 a.m. nightmares, scrubbing stains, wrestling car seats, arriving late wherever she goes, making snacks and making snacks and making snacks and making snacks—Celia tries to picture how it felt to be the person she was before. On her worst days she marvels, with spikes of jealous desperation, at anyone who’s decided kids aren’t in the cards, more and more of them recently: all the friends choosing to stay child-free, confidently opting out from the get-go, just yeah, no thanks, I’m good. Like Joslyn, for example, who backpacked through Morocco last month and sleeps until ten on Sunday mornings and has gradually stopped inviting her places. It’s a little terrifying, actually, the way Celia can see her old life—the energy, the autonomy—but not feel it, as if the details of her past are on display behind a thick glass wall. There to be watched, not touched. Replaced by something louder and more immediate.
As though they might come unhinged if she lets go, Zoe clutches her injured knuckles and shrieks until she chokes. Celia reaches for her and forgets, only for a nanosecond, that she’s supposed to be holding a stroller. It rolls just out of her grip—down, down, controlled at first, then bumping and wobbling and careening away with Jack still strapped inside. “Shit!” Celia says. She starts after it with Zoe in her arms and Helen stumbling along behind them, her toddler howling with laughter now instead of pain and chanting, “Shitshitshitshitshit.”
At the bottom, a woman about Celia’s age deftly stops the stroller with one manicured hand. She is calm and polished: sleek ponytail, trendy jeans, heeled ankle booties. “Gotcha, little buddy,” she coos, and meets a frantic Celia in the middle to return her precious cargo.
Celia smiles and says thank you, but in reality—just for a moment—she resents her. The way this woman gets to release the stroller and waltz away from so much chaos with nothing more than a breezy wave, a freedom that drifts behind her like luxurious perfume.
2.
Celia smiles and waves, but in reality—just for a moment—she resents her. The way this woman gets to walk off with that stroller, the way she smells of rocking chairs and lullabies and protectiveness and powder.
At the bottom, prior to their encounter, Celia had been watching two of the children circling their mother like ebullient planets, the baby contentedly munching a snack before the cup tumbled, and then remembered to avert her eyes. Families always catch her ogling. Just yesterday, while Celia stared at a tantruming toddler in the grocery store, his mother had snarled, “Oh, I’m sure you’d do a much better job.” But Celia wasn’t judging. She’d been studying, wondering, imagining herself in this role and deciding again: Yes, still.
As though she might come unhinged without a distraction, Celia plunges a hand into her tote in search of gum, her water bottle, earbuds, anything, and sneaks a glance at the frenzied woman as she turns to go. They could almost be twins, Celia notices, startled. Their similarities are that striking: the bone structure, the coloring. But Celia does not have the hunched, exhausted posture or the bare face, the dazed expression which has absorbed so much sound that now an endless, frazzled static is trapped permanently beneath the skin.
Celia can only remember silence. Quiet meals at home when Warren works late, quiet rides to and from the office. She often pictures a car seat in the back. A tiny voice singing nursery rhymes and asking questions. Once, at a birthday party, her friend Joslyn—mother of two, one more on the way—complained: “They never, ever shut up, you know? It’s just a lot.” Because everyone else was nodding, Celia had said, “I get it,” and Joslyn raised her eyebrows and snapped, “Actually, you really don’t.” But Celia hadn’t meant I understand. She’d meant: I can see you through this thick glass wall, and it looks like it must be difficult sometimes. She and Joslyn had drifted apart after that—or not drifted so much as dropped away from each other with the heavy thud of something abandoned.
A few pedestrians, mostly men, dip their chin and smile as they pass. Her phone rings while she is still rummaging through her belongings, and Celia answers gratefully. A distraction at last. Warren asks about dinner, if he should order the lo mein from their favorite takeout place.
“No no,” Celia says quickly. “No way. You know I can’t do chicken right now.” She is so tired of that word. Hearing it, saying it. Are you two finally expecting? No. Did the shots work this month? No. Do you think we should explore other options? No—not yet. Maybe eventually, honey, but what if we just give it one more try?
Celia keeps track in a small green notebook she doesn’t need. Even without checking a single page, she can list the dates of every positive test, the dates her symptoms started to wane, the dates she’d had to call Warren from the bathroom at work. She knows exactly when they all happened. Exactly what she was wearing, exactly where she was standing. So far there have been three.
It really doesn’t make sense. She and Warren have always followed every last recommendation, which means nothing is fair and her hormones are clearly betraying her. There are kits you can buy, people said. Are you temping? So Celia bought kits and took her temperature each morning, fumbling for the thermometer on her nightstand almost before she’d opened her eyes. Stop thinking about it, people said, so Celia tried not to notice all the carefully staged social media announcements and family holiday cards and how clinical it now felt to touch Warren. The only date Celia doesn’t know is when, exactly, she’d begun to recoil when he reached for her. A few months ago, maybe? Longer? Last cycle, they’d done it only once—one time, because the kit instructed them to—and somehow sex, too, had gone silent. She says goodbye to Warren and tries to put her phone away, but it catches an edge of the bag and turns her tote upside down.
When the contents spill all over the sidewalk, Celia thinks of being pregnant, how one day soon she might not be able to bend down to pick them up. She’s only six weeks this time and memories have already started surging back in suffocating waves. It’s still early. You never know— she starts, but Celia won’t allow herself to finish that thought, not when its magnitude eclipses everything else.
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Melissa Bowers is a writer from the Midwest who is currently based in California. She is a past winner of the SmokeLong Quarterly Grand Micro Contest, the Breakwater Review Fiction Prize, the F(r)iction flash fiction competition, and The Writer’s personal essay contest. Her work has twice been selected for the Wigleaf Top 50 as well as The Best Small Fictions anthology, and has appeared or is forthcoming in Copper Nickel, The Cincinnati Review, The Greensboro Review, New Ohio Review, River Teeth, The Forge, and The Boston Globe Magazine, among others. Read more at www.melissabowers.com.