Anne Valente
Letterman had gotten through six of his Top Ten when I heard your voice. You were quiet, almost inaudible really, and later I wondered how long you had been standing there. Not that it mattered, or that I’d even been watching anything questionable. But sometimes it made me feel strange – for reasons I can’t even explain – to think that maybe you knew we had separate lives in some way, and that sometimes we did things that weren’t always the same.
You said you couldn’t sleep, and you stood there at the bottom of the stairs, your fingers tugging absently at your pajama pants. All the lights in the house were out, and I could barely see you in the television’s glow. You wanted a bedtime story, you said. Some girls at school had told you about Bloody Mary today, and though you weren’t afraid – that wasn’t it – you just couldn’t sleep, was all. You didn’t even have a mirror in your room.
I muted the television, since the Top Ten wasn’t so good anyway. The Top Ten Reasons I Like Being An Accountant, which was boring, even for a Tuesday night. In the weak blue light we found the stairs, and you held the banister the entire way up, taking each step with both feet.
After you’d jumped onto your bed and buried yourself in the covers, I sat alongside and asked what you wanted to hear. Your face looked like a moon, with the covers pulled to your chin like that.
Tell me how I began, you said.
But you already know, I said. You’d heard me say it, what felt like at least a hundred times before.
But you were lying, you said, and when you said it, something in my chest twitched, in the way horse skin does to shake a fly.
I wouldn’t lie, I said, and in some sense, I knew that was true.
Gemma said storks bring babies, you said, your eyebrows wrinkled. Her mom told her they bring babies to the hospital, and that you go and pick them up.
I closed my eyes. What I’d told you could stand, at least for tonight.
Gemma didn’t tell you that all babies are different, I said. Maybe a bird brought her here, but you came another way.
But how? You looked at me, your eyes as round as your small moon face. How did I fall from the sky?
When I looked at you then, I knew that something had come to an end, and that even the greatest of stories tonight could not halt the inevitability of the one I owed you at some future time, in some future room that I hoped was not this one.
Well, you fell from the sky, I said. But there’s more to it than that.
And there is where I began.
I told you that weather was fickle, and that much in the same way that hurricanes and thunderstorms and tornadoes pop up in the most unexpected of ways, so too can babies if you’re not watching. But I told you that I was watching, that I’d been watching and waiting for you, with my eye on one small cloud that had been hovering over my backyard for days. Most clouds move, and they drift along with the winds, but this little cloud stuck around while I watered my herb garden on the back porch, and while I read in the afternoons outside. And one day, when it was terribly, terribly hot, I told you I could see the water from a lake nearby gravitating toward the sky, in the way that it does just before it rains. With that water floating upward – barely visible, but I could see it nonetheless – that little cloud started getting heavier and heavier, and darker and darker. The day got so hot that I just about thought I’d melt, when suddenly that small cloud burst into a million raindrops, and one of them landed in my yard.
I told you that I knelt down in the grass where the droplet had landed, and when I did, I saw there was a baby floating on the water inside. But when I tried to touch the raindrop, it popped like a magic bubble. And that’s when you tumbled into my arms.
This is what I told you, right through to the end. But by the time I’d told you how it was that you began, you were already asleep, your cheeks puffed and soft. And as I headed back down the stairs, toward the light of the muted television, I wondered if now might be the start of something hard, of an inevitable slide toward one terrible moment when I would have to tell you that I was your mother – always, your mother – but not in any manner of blood.
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Anne Valente is an MFA candidate in fiction at Bowling Green State University and assistant editor of Storyglossia. Her work has appeared in PANK, Monkeybicycle, Fiction Weekly and The Washington Post, and is forthcoming in Keyhole Magazine and Storyglossia.
