Just Like Mother by Anne Heltzel

Author:Anne Heltzel
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Tom Doherty Associates

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The following days were a blur. I slept the way newborns sleep: deeply, waking only for food, and then tumbling back to oblivion when sated. I dreamed of Olivia dolls surrounding me in the bed, sucking and yawning. Another figment of my imagination, but one that was understandable. Ever since they’d begun popping up around the house, it seemed as if they were everywhere. Everyone wanted a piece of them, Andrea said at one point. Everyone, who? I’d wondered. But I didn’t have time to wonder much, because sleep was always beckoning.

One morning, I woke at dawn, desperately needing to pee. I opened my door, noticing absently that it had no lock. I stumbled down the hallway, the soles of my feet gripping the wooden floorboards. Barely lifting in their shuffle. I wasn’t surprised when a sliver of wood embedded itself in the tender part of my sole. I kept going. I felt disoriented, light-headed from not having eaten much.

The hallway was unfamiliar and grimy, as though no one had thought to clean way back here. My new room was in a completely different part of the house from the old one. This realization was even more disorienting. How had I found the bathroom? The rest of the house was still asleep.

I walked farther down the hall, raising a self-conscious hand to the back of my matted scalp. The hair was significantly thinner from stress. I stopped in front of one door. Tried the knob. It stuck. I made my way to another door. There was a slender bar of light, just barely visible where it made a seam with the floor. I pressed my palm to the knob, which felt warm, as though it had recently been touched. I let my eyes rove up and down the hallway—empty. I turned the knob, heedless of whether someone was inside.

For a brief moment, my breath caught in my throat. I wondered what I might find. Somewhere in my distant consciousness, in a more primitive place, I wished for a puppy. A moment of innocence lost that I could never reclaim.

The door swung open.

It wasn’t a puppy that met my gaze. It wasn’t even a toilet, a vanity, or the creature comfort of scented lotion.

It was a pile of wriggling, discarded babies. Dozens. A mound of them, as if the room were a mass grave. My eyes fixed on one, missing a leg. Its eyes blinked rapidly. Another, partially buried underneath it, had a split in its earlobe. It resembled a cloven hoof.

I heard a crackling noise from within the pile. The sound of static. I stepped into the room, my body seeking the source of the sound of its own accord. I had to find it. I had to make it stop.

There was a string attached to a bulb overhead. I gave it a yank, and light flooded the room, illuminating the babies. Their expressions looked menacing in the light’s harsh glare. The crackling noise came from the back of the room.

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