Just over a month ago I made it into the second round of NYC Midnight’s Short Story Challenge. The challenge started in January with 4700 writers. After the first round we were reduced to 790. In each round writers are placed in heats of about 30-35 writers and are given a genre, subject and character to write about. Each round the word count and time to write goes down. In the last round we had three days to write a 2000 word short story. Below is mine.
This story placed first in my heat. Which blows my mind, and means that this weekend I will have two days to write a 1500 word short story along with 160 other writers, on a genre, subject and character I haven’t learned about yet. It is exciting and terrifying and I love being able to exercise my writing in this way.
Genre: Romantic Comedy
Character: A heckler
Subject: Inexperience
Milk? No.
Sleep? Ha, what even is sleep?
I look down at Gina, her sweet face crinkled into great displeasure, and I sink back against the couch.
“What is it? What do you want from me?” I ask. I decide to try milk again, it’s really the only game I have. I’ve stopped wearing shirts, no one told me being a new mother would be akin to joining a nudist colony. I hoist her to my left breast – she has always liked left best. I don’t know if right is rotten, but she is just not into right, I put her there and she screams. It’s like I can hear her sneering, “Is that the best you’ve got?” If left is Champagne, right is lousy hooch. I don’t even try her on the right anymore. It’s totally ok to have two completely different sized and shaped breasts. One hanging like a deflated balloon, next to an engorged and dimpled cantaloupe.
She shakes her head, whimpering. She looks angry, shit, she’s going to scream. Her face gets red and angry, and there she goes, “I don’t know what you want, Gina,” I cry.
She cries louder, and I hear, “Are you even capable of taking care of yourself, let alone a baby. You don’t even have a shirt on!”
“Maybe she’s hungry,” Devon asks, walking into the living room.
I glare at him, “right, because I never thought of that.” Seriously, it’s like he shows up to torture me.
“Sorry, is there something I can do to help?” He asks, sitting beside me, he looks at my two odd-sized breasts, and cups one in his hand.
“Um, not that. Just take her,” I say, handing off the screaming child to my husband.
Gina immediately calms down, as Devon takes her and cradles her against his shoulder, “Just missed daddy, sweet Gina,” he coos.
“I think she hates me,” I say. I’m jealous. It’s true. I try not to be, but it’s so hard when your whole body and life has been taken over. You have this sweet little baby that you and everyone loves, and that loves everyone – except, seemingly, you.
Ever since I gave birth, Gina has been intent on destroying my confidence. She is expert level. She probably practiced the whole nine months of gestation to get it right. It starts with sweet giggles and coos, and then I pick her up, and she looks happy for a moment and then disintegrates. Maybe it’s my smell, oh my god, when was the last time I even showered? Either way, she finds ways to make me question my every move. How can someone so young and tiny, be so incredibly powerful? And yet, I can’t help myself. I love her so much that I keep trying. I do things to entertain her, I feed her, I play with her, take her for walks. She continues to complain, and I continue to try. It’s the circle of life.
“She doesn’t hate you; she loves you,” Devon says, snuggling his face into her squishy little neck. I swear they make babies cute and squishy so that you can’t get mad at them.
“I don’t know what I’m doing, you seem to have it all figured out, and I am a complete mess. I don’t even wear shirts anymore,” I cry.
“I know,” Devon lifts his eyebrows seductively.
“Ugh.”
“Look, babe, we are new at this, neither of us knows what we are doing. She is our first baby – ”
“First and last,” I mumble under my breath.
“She is new, we are new, we are all just figuring each other out. She doesn’t hate you. She feels comfortable enough around you to let you know when she isn’t happy, that is a beautiful thing,” Devon says, grasping my hand.
“Thank you,” I mostly mean it. He is so calm and collected, which is so infuriating because I am not. Maybe that is the problem with Gina, she is feeling the anxiety roll off of me, the feelings of inadequacy. How can I ever be enough for her? No one told me being a mom would be this hard. I mean, except for the whole world who said that, but I didn’t appreciate the level of difficulty. Am I that asshole that thought I would be different?
There are things no one told me. Like the fact that I would have such bad hemorrhoids and tearing after birth that I would lose control and shit my pants. That when they say it takes six weeks to recover physically, what they really mean is that it takes six weeks to recover enough for your husband to have sex with you. However, you are still sore and can’t walk more than a few blocks without feeling like your vagina is going to fall out of your body. Or that every time you sneeze or laugh, you pee.
No one tells you that wearing shirts is entirely overrated. It is better to walk around topless because you are now a human milk fountain. Still, it is essential to remember that you aren’t wearing a shirt when the doorbell rings, and your in-laws are standing there with a care package of healing teas and soups. Oh God, that was so embarrassing, I can see Devon’s parents in my mind, starring in horror, and the stuttering and backing away.
“I’m going to take a shower. Can you watch her for a while?” I ask Devon.
“Yeah, of course, babe, take your time,” he says, taking the remote and turning on a hockey game, “Gina is excited about the game.”
I stand in the scalding stream of water, letting it wash away the aches and exhaustion from my muscles. I feel refreshed as I wrap myself in a towel. I wipe away some steam from the mirror and look at my reflection. I think about Devon in the living room with our baby girl, and how good he is with her, how good he is to me. It’s time, I decide, I’m going to get out of this funk, and put on some makeup, and a shirt, maybe even a bra, and I’m going to look really nice for him. We are going to put Gina down, and we are going to have a romantic evening. I think we both need it.
I dry and straighten my hair and put on makeup. Then I find a sexy little black dress that is stretchy enough to fit over my post-partum body. I look better than I have since before Gina came home.
“Hey babe,” I give my best sultry voice, and stand with my arm against the wall, and my hip jutted out.
“Oh, la la,” he growls. Standing and coming toward me.
“Wait, where is Gina?” I say, looking around, I don’t see or hear her, and that seems – impossible.
“Sleeping, I put her down in her crib, she is snoring like a twelve-pound angel,” he grins. “And you, you look like a Victoria’s Secret Angel,” he says coyly.
I laugh, “Oh god, ok, well, thank you.” I blush a little. “I thought we could rekindle some old feelings, and explore a new frontier,” I giggle, pulling on a strand of my hair. I’m doing my best sexy, sultry woman, but it is all cheese. Luckily, Devon likes cheese.
He jumps over the ottoman, catching his toe on the way, and falls flat on his face, “Ow, shit.”
“Oh my god, are you ok?” I ask, stifling laughter as it bubbles up.
He shakes it off, “Yeah, I’m good, and you…mmmm.”
We make our way to the bedroom and are having a great time when I get it in my head that I should talk dirty. Devon loves it when I talk dirty, “Does that feel good?” I ask in my most sultry voice.
“Yeah.”
“Where does it feel good?”
He looks up for a second, “Um, my penis.”
I burst into laughter. I haven’t gotten used to this new version of my body. The laughter causes a fart, the fart causes more laughter, and then it is happening before I know it, I am peeing, and I can’t stop. “Get out,” I yell.
“What?”
“Get out, get out, I can’t stop, oh my god, get out.”
“It’s ok, it’s ok.”
“No, get out, I can’t stop.” He is taking utterly too long to get away from me. I’m disgusted and embarrassed, and so tired.
Devon stands up, pulling back sheets and blankets, “It’s ok, I’m not going to leave you. I’m not going to leave you.”
“Leave me? Leave me? Why the hell would you leave me? What does that even mean?”
“You don’t have to be embarrassed, babe. It happens,” he says, pulling off the sheets from the bed as I run into the bathroom to clean myself up.
“It doesn’t happen, Devon. It happened to me, but this is not something that you read about in What to Expect When You’re Expecting. No one tells you that you’ll pee the bed in the middle of sex. This doesn’t happen,” I peek my head around the corner and see him pulling all the bedding into a pile.
“Look, I still love you, we can still have sex, it’s fine.”
“We are not having sex. Not right now. Oh my god. This is beyond anything.” I am mortified and curl into a ball on the bathroom floor.
Devon comes in and kneels beside me, “We can sleep in the guest room tonight. I’m going to go throw this bedding in the laundry. I love you.”
He kisses my cheek and makes his way down the stairs. I realize that in all the commotion, Gina never made a peep. Oh my god, is she still breathing? I need to go check. I crack the door of her room open and listen, I can’t hear anything. I open it further and walk in the room, it’s too dark to see anything, and all I hear is the sound of ocean waves from her sound machine. I place my hand gently on her belly and feel the rhythmic up and down of her breath. It relaxes me, and I take a deep breath.
I quietly make my way out and across to the guest bedroom.
“Is she ok?” Devon asks. He has made himself comfortable in bed, patting the spot beside him.
I grin, “Yeah, she’s breathing, and sleeping, and not yelling at me, so I think she’s going to be just fine.”
“You know, it doesn’t matter to me what just happened. What matters to me is that you are happy. Are you happy?” Devon asks as I climb into bed beside him.
“I’m exhausted. I feel like a failure. And I just peed the bed. But through it all, I have this husband who ‘won’t leave me’ when I pee the bed in the middle of sex, so I mean, what else could I want,” I laugh.
“We will laugh about this one day,” he says, stroking my hair.
“Maybe, but we will only laugh with each other because there is no chance in hell you are telling anyone about how your wife peed in the middle of sex. This isn’t some kink for the guys,” I say, nuzzling my head against his warm chest.
He laughs, “I would never. Gina, on the other hand, is likely to spread it all around the daycare.”
As if in agreement with her father, Gina gives a yelp, that soon turns into a full-blown cry. Because, sleep, who even knows what that is anymore?