fiction by savannah gripshover

Glaciers

So the baby fell out of me not like a comet cutting through the heavens or like a coconut descending from the palms to bash the cranium of the first upright creature–it fell out of me the way a baby slides out of a woman, a puzzle of meats, a slosh of blood, a stubborn tooth uncurling from the pink hook of the wild mouth. I was nineteen years old and failing two classes. If my parents found out I was failing two classes, they would've split me in half. Somehow, a baby did the job first.

Luther and I were in love, unfortunately. I alternated back and forth between him being the love of my life or simply the short-term love that helped categorize my adolescence. I was entirely certain we would be married eventually, even if not for long. He'd make a stellar first husband. His forever-stomach accepting of all my cooking, as devastating as it might've went down; his quick hands crowning my waist in public, applauding unabashedly at every mediocre performance; his swooping hair, paperback perfect, the way it never knotted no matter how desperately I tugged. I didn't need him to be mine forever. I just needed him to be mine now, just a little longer, just a little more, always coaxing for more of the thing already in my hands.

He played hockey and double majored in Environmental Science and Business. Minored in Math. Wanted to get lucky and worm his way into an exclusive, renowned climatology society; Ice is my everything, he would say, cold hands gripping the steel rails dividing the booth from the rink, And it’s melting and it’s scaring me. 

Obviously, he said it for the cinema of the thing. Blows of primordial frozen water slinking free of its prison to swallow the earth would never interact with his stage, never take away or affect the imitation he danced upon–but the metaphor was sweet, it was good, it made me lean over and kiss his battered mouth, it did the job. 

I'll be the nice guy, the compromise, he mused in bed, painting the darkened ceiling daydream-bright with every switch of his wrist. The big, smoke-shitting companies will give in to me, and I'll negotiate, and I'll smile, and I'll bridge the gap.

It didn't sound insane when he said it. Luther was cloyingly perfect, confusingly so; people liked him, liked talking to him. He was a golden retriever delivering conversation topics and rambunctious jokes into the excited hands of strangers, who eagerly received him and cuffed his ears and cooed his praises. Dating him was like waking up trapped in an alternate reality: something is off, ever so slightly, and yet there's no way to define it or prove it or change a damn thing. Optimism reminds me that maybe it means I woke up in the safe dimension, the superior dimension. My new home.

So, I appreciated that he fell in love with me, that he introduced me to his smart friends, that he taught me how to ice skate, slicing shapes in the ground with his blades like a god.

I didn't know I was pregnant with Luther’s baby until it slept bloody in my two hands. 

It was a girl. Round and odd-looking, shrimp-colored, face all furled up like rage drained the energy out of her. She didn't scream or cry. She looked around the room, unimpressed– You’re taking out how much in loans to sleep in this shithole? I could almost imagine her voice leaking free through the veil of editing, sapping the laugh track loose from the audience. An immediate, cosmic sense entered me, body and soul: this little girl would be funny, and smart, and I can see it in her scrunched-up, ugly face, that she was the manifestation of a rare kind of achingly delicious wit.

Then I remembered I couldn't keep her, didn't know her–I was embarrassed by the assumptions slamming through me, the acquaintance I adopted with so little preamble.

Like we were at a stilted party, I introduced myself with a slow hi, baby, and those words woke her up, enraged her: she screamed.

I held her between my arms as I twitched and stumbled my way to the closet. I couldn't remember the last time I washed my towels. I bundled the baby up in red fuzz. She smelled like me. Instinctually: my blood. Truly: my perfume, still fizzing through the towel fibers. 

Little arms wrestled me and I held her closer and closer against my chest, like some kind of primal chant could communicate through my heartbeat and put her at ease.

She was inconsolable. With all the bland nonchalance of a bad story, I found my phone and called Luther.

Remember how I told you my worst fear was a cryptic pregnancy? 

Uh-oh, he said, and later, he told me it was because he thought I had discovered a new fear, invented a new contraption to kick, joined a new cult to devote myself to. 

Because I lived in an all-female dorm, I had to lie the baby down on the bed by herself to waddle out to the hall and let him in through the locked doors. We came back in–his hand on my lower back, cooling a pain that had burnt through all my nerves–and the baby was silent, disturbingly so. The urge to cry slithered in through my mouth and throttled me. I understood, suddenly, that if this baby died, I would kill myself. Quickly and unceremoniously. It would be the only thing that made sense.

Luther darted to her side and picked her up with expert hands. He cuddled her; she whimpered, cute. Terrifying. The magnitude of this eight-pound thing, this soul that traveled through a portal I hadn't known was open. What other paranormal riffs existed, waiting to be pried open, begging to bleed? The world no longer operated inside a binary. Worst fears do come true; they make TLC shows out of them.

What are we gonna do? Luther breathed out, and I responded, I want to go to the hospital, because my hips hurt like hell, but then I looked at him, really looked at him, and I realized I was peering into a delicate scene: a father cradling his baby, his half-clone, his sudden everything. His face was softer than anything I'd ever seen before. He was talking to her: What are we gonna do?

On the ride to the hospital, I carried the baby in my arms. It felt like the most illegal thing I had ever done. I looked at the baby knowing I had plucked life out of thin air, as intangible as it all was–I was first-man, translating blaze into warmth. I watched the road knowing every car had the violently divine ability to sever us in half and strike us dead. We made it there safe, carried by nonstop ‘80’s throwbacks.

At the hospital, we called my dad while the nurses experimented on the baby. He said, Please tell me it's Luther’s. Luther's presence eased everything: a traumatic birth, a million dollar expense, an eighteen-year commitment. All the ooze and fear slid right off once it caught the scent of him. He walked through life untouched by shame or guilt or doubt or hesitance. It was infectious. Sometimes bliss would rattle me so wondrously I almost believed we could keep the baby, be together forever. That was all him. 

It’s Luther’s, I told Dad. But more than anything I just wanted to say It’s mine. I coughed her out while pretending to study; my DNA designed the flip of her translucent eyelashes. She was mine. At least for today. I needed her to be mine.

Luther called his dad, then his mom, then we both called my mom, together. At that point we were on the edge of tears. Cathartic and exhausting, delightful but terrifying, this emotion–it was like the sadistic joy of dizzying yourself, teetering on the edge of being dazzled or made ill by the swirl in your brain. We were saying We had a baby! like it was news that could save the world. We were saying We had a baby like the truth would send us to prison. 

In the end we couldn't keep her. We all knew that. We talked back and forth for a while. Once again, on our backs, splitting a hospital bed instead of my dorm’s; always sharing twin beds, the two of us, interlocked in a dysfunctional tangle. Once again, his wrist conducted the golden future, this time on the pristine white ceiling, fluorescent as a coma. 

I’ll save the world and the butterflies and the glaciers and we’ll enroll her in piano lessons and teach her to tie her light-up shoes and let her keep the kittens she pulls free from the sewers, he promised. Or maybe we’ll settle. We’ll get realistic. I'll get a real job and work long hours. We’ll have a Vegas wedding but not in Vegas since we’re using our Vegas money on Pampers. Whatever it is. Wherever we are. You, me, and her.

Her, like she was a stranger. Like he was offhandedly confirming the existence of a side character. 

But these were just fantasies, just like saving the glaciers, just like shaking the hands of oil tycoons, just like pleasing my father. It was easy to dream with Luther. The world glowed with him. Until I closed my eyes and my mind went blank: shit, a million and one intense intuitions whispered, the voices of my ancestors united in dread-soaked awe. And in those moments, it was just so dark. 

We named the baby Leona. I was reading my horoscope when the pain first sizzled; that serves me right for indulging in that kind of thing. Leona was born on August first: Leo sun, Gemini Moon, Virgo rising. I know it's stupid. None of it’s real. But as soon as the social workers carted her away, I found one of the websites and clicked in her information, making an account and logging in and confirming I read the terms and conditions and everything. Just to read about her, to see her name in print.

So, Leona was here and then gone. She was The baby for longer than she was Leona. She might not even continue to be Leona; her adopters might mutate her name into something trendy and digestible, something cute. Maybe there were only a few hours in her little life where she existed as mine, as Luther’s, as Leona–that's probably a good thing. 

Back at school, Luther wordlessly massaged my lower back, dipping his muscled hands into the ache-bitten skin. He worked and worked and worked on making me okay. Bought me flowers, sent my emails, loved me viciously. One day I woke up and the pain in my back stopped creaking and the knot in my throat stopped tightening and I could open the closet without adrenaline begging me to locate the red blanket, bury my face in the scent, hunt like a drug-dog for evidence of her.

We didn't talk about it much, didn't even acknowledge the whole ordeal. Except this one night while we he practiced late, me reading a book in the stands, watching him from a comical distance–this was our bit, me isolated like an atom in the stretch of theater seats, his voice adventuring up through the stadium, fucking in his car like strangers–when he stopped skating, stood perfectly still. 

He was a shadow atop the perfect white-blue. An optical illusion, a vertical patch of glitch. He held a hand out at his side. Started to glide, slow and measured. One foot after the other. Gentle. It reminded me of all the times he tried to teach me to skate. Then I realized whose trembling fingers he was imagining in his hands, whose fear he'd like to nurse, whose chill he wished to warm up.