Nightbitch: A Novel by Rachel Yoder

Author:Rachel Yoder [Yoder, Rachel]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780385546812
Google: k-Q0zgEACAAJ
Amazon: 0385546815
Publisher: Doubleday
Published: 2021-07-19T23:00:00+00:00

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THEY WERE REALLY ON it now, on the mommy schedule, the mommy fast-track if you will, Book Babies and the playground and today—how could it already be Friday!? such a beautiful day!—Tyke Hyke. Next week, it would be Play Space at the mall and Gymnastic Jam. Nightbitch had already scheduled it! Really, the sky was the limit—literally. Balloon Babies was all the rage now, a hot-air balloon experience that encouraged overcoming phobias / a love of heights.

She surged with mommy adrenaline, the knowledge she was doing what was best for her child and focusing on his needs. How can I be a more perfect mother? she wanted to know. She was nearly foaming at the mouth with the question, with projecting the most mommyishness she could. Of course, there would be some dog in there, too, but she could just tuck that in behind everything, behind her most excellent motherhood.

The boy had a runny nose and a horrible little cough, and during the entire drive to Tyke Hyke the sweet little prince had been kicking the back of her seat, despite her calm implorations that he please stop and that it wasn’t nice or funny and that she would take away cartoons, a threat she seldom carried out, because she, too, wanted the boy to watch cartoons. She wanted it so badly, so that she could stand at the kitchen counter and eat coins of dry salami on buttery crackers and think about nothing. So that she could clean her pores in her magnified mirror for a full episode of his favorite doggy cartoon, or lie in the middle of the living-room floor and close her eyes without the threat that any small person, in that particular cartooned moment, might pounce directly on the fleshy middle of her and bruise a vital organ, or kick her head, then trip and fall again onto her fleshy core, or spit in her general direction, because how remarkable that a body could produce its very own liquid! Just like that! Look, Mama! Look!

And so the boy kicked her seat, and she seethed, and very soon they arrived at the trailhead for Tyke Hyke. She told herself to calm down, not to get angry, no yelling and absolutely no barking, and then she told him there were no doggy games on the hike, and he instantly began to weep because, you see, the boy had been anticipating his doggy games in the great outdoors, in the woods! where there were so many smells! and sticks! and bugs! a doggy would like.

It really was her own fault. She had allowed the child to wear his brand-new blue collar with a shiny silver tag that flashed in the sunlight and made a satisfying tink when it tapped against the other metal parts of the collar. She had allowed him to wear this around his neck in the car, just for fun, and had not properly warned him that it would need to come off upon arrival at Tyke Hyke.

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