The Day the Baby Arrived
The baby appeared under the tree one afternoon, well after The End. It lay on a blanket, the same blue of the Old World sky, and kicked its fat baby legs. The tree barely shaded the white-hot sun from the baby’s innocent skin.
The baby’s gurgling was the loudest sound Jenna had heard in a long time. The silence after The End was so enormous, Jenna’s ears strained to fill in the nothing, even if it was with sounds which weren’t real. Once, she’d heard a car engine. Often there was the sound of an owl in the middle of the night. Sometimes, she heard her mother singing. So when Jenna first heard the baby, she’d put her fingers in her ears and jiggled them to get the sound to stop. When it didn’t work, she followed the noise to the yard.
Never before had she seen things which weren’t there. There was still plenty to look at even after The End, not like the unending silence. Jenna pressed fists to her eyes to scrub the image of the baby away. Her world came back into focus and there was still a baby on a blanket, under the long-dead tree.
“Hello, little one,” Jenna said, expecting an answer. “How did you get here?”
The baby waved its bare feet at the sky.
Jenna wasn’t sure whether she was allowed to keep the baby. Rick, Jeff and Leah had gone scavenging, so she couldn’t ask them. They never took her with them. Too much of a risk, they said. They expected her to look after the house, not eat too much and do as she was told.
She could see a patch of skin on the baby’s shoulder had turned red from the sun. “We need to go inside. Come on. Let’s go.” But the baby wouldn’t get up. It must be able to move by itself. It had got here, hadn’t it? She clapped her hands. “Come on. Up you get.” The baby laughed at her. The sound shattered the air.
Jenna decided she would have to carry the baby. She scooped it up, surprised at how light it was in her arms. Much lighter than the wood she collected each day. The baby also smelled milky sweet. A memory flickered, its edges slippery so Jenna struggled to grab it. As she breathed in the baby’s scent, the memory solidified. She felt Mama holding her, tipping her towards a large pot on the stove to show her cans of condensed milk she had boiled to make caramel.
Jenna licked the baby’s face. “You smell nicer than you taste.” she said, bending to get the blanket,
In the house, Jenna put the baby on the floor. “You are my first baby,” she said as she sat down next to it. “Did you know, babies are banned here? They banned cars first but it didn’t slow down The End, so they banned babies.”
The baby didn’t say Jenna should be seen not heard. It made a nice change. She leaned closer to it. “Banning babies came too late, little one. There were already too many people. The End came pretty fast.”
The two of them sat in silence, thinking about The End.
* * *
Jenna stared at the clock on the wall. She’d put batteries into it once. When the hands began to move, she’d become disoriented and she had taken the batteries back out. The clock now permanently sits at sixteen minutes past one.
The baby seemed happy enough, so Jenna left it and went a few houses down, where there was a stash of special food. She grabbed Spam, canned peas and a packet of powder which you add water to, turning it into a chocolate dessert.
The day a baby arrived seemed to be the kind of day to have nice food. She hoped the others would agree.
How long had they been gone?
The sun slipped away, dark fingers of night reaching over the world. The night wind came next, blowing minuscule fragments of the dead as a punishing dust into every crack and crevice. Jenna knew the others couldn’t be out in the night wind. They would find somewhere safe to sleep so the dust wouldn’t fill their lungs. The dust is what killed her mother, or at least that is what the others told her.
Jenna shared the special food with the baby, who she’d propped up with pillows on the sky blue blanket. She passed slivers of Spam to its outstretched hands. The baby picked up peas, one at a time, in tiny pincer fingers. The chocolate pudding was tricky to feed to the baby. It smeared everywhere, even into the baby’s ears.
Jenna used a little warm water in an oval tub, usually reserved for washing dishes, to bathe the baby. The baby’s dark eyes stayed fixed on Jenna’s face. As she washed the baby, Jenna noticed her hands looked how her mother’s used to; splotched with dark patches and the skin loose. It was strange because she felt like a girl inside but her hands told a different story.
Just this morning she was too small and weak to go scavenging. The others had left her here with instructions to get the firewood, pump the water and not go too far from the house. Rick had squeezed her arm so hard, she could still feel his grip. “Don’t eat all the food, like last time, you Stupid Little Girl.”
That was this morning, wasn’t it?
She ran those old hands over her face and through her hair. She felt how the skin at her jaw sagged and her hair, once thick and soft, was now coarse and wiry.
Time was very confusing.
The baby laughed as she poured water onto its belly. The owl was back, hooting right outside the window. Her mother’s voice sang a lilting tune which pulled Jenna’s heart into her throat.
She leaned over the baby, breathing in the warm sweetness. “I think I’ll call you Hope.”
Trish Tuthill has had short fiction published in Writings to Stem Your Existential Dread published by Scribes Divided andThe First Line and has placed twice in the YeahWrite Superchallenge and The Whanganui Chronicle annual short story competition.She lives in New Zealand although her roots are in Africa and her heart lies in the Cook Islands.