Screams from the Dark by Ellen Datlow

Author:Ellen Datlow
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Tom Doherty Associates

CRICK CRACK RATTLE TAP

by A. C. Wise

The baby is hungry again.

The wail comes like tiny, scratching fingernails prying Kiersten’s eyelids wide. She knocks her phone to the ground trying to grab it to read the time—12:47 A.M.—and once she sits up to retrieve it, there’s no point crawling back under the covers, hoping the baby will stop.

It never will.

Because the baby is always hungry. Because Kiersten is never allowed to get a single fucking hour of uninterrupted sleep. Because she’s a mother now, not an individual human being.

She fumbles on a robe. The wail continues, rising and falling in time with the storm, matching the wind until it suddenly drops out of synch. There’s a moment of unnerving silence, followed by a series of pathetic, broken sobs. To her sleep-deprived brain, they sound fake, spiteful, like the baby is mocking her and proving it is in control.

Kiersten knows that babies cry. They get hungry and gassy and need to be changed. It’s not their fault. But knowing this rationally, and feeling charitable toward the baby in this exact moment, are two different things.

Since Nick left—since she kicked him out—her life has been a blur of waking and sleeping in fits and starts. Exhaustion, her brain mush, time lurching forward, crawling, then rushing ahead again. She can’t help the petty thoughts or the inappropriate anger bubbling up now and then.

It’s only been three weeks since her maternity leave started. Already, her life before seems like something that happened to someone else. She holds in her head an idealized version of that time, so much so that she almost misses the faculty at the university seeing her as no more than administrative support, fit only to fetch and carry and fulfill their requests at a moment’s notice. Not unlike the baby, but at least their requests came in the form of email rather than screaming her awake in the middle of the night.

Kiersten pushes open the nursery door.

Tick tick tick tick.

Ice pellets rattle against the glass. The baby snuffles, a miserable sound. Shadows the color of a darkening bruise cluster, seeming deeper where the night-light next to the crib has burned out. The wind sounds louder at this end of the house too, making a hollow wooing noise as it rounds the corners. She pulls her robe closer, and peers into the crib.

She can’t help bracing herself every single time—expecting the baby blue and cold, strangled in its sleep, breath stopped. But it kicks chubby limbs, lungs healthy, mouth wide. As if cued by her presence, the baby ramps up its cry—a painful scream, the kind that leaves a throat raw.

Kiersten lets it go. Just for a moment. Just to prove she has some measure of control too.

And immediately, she feels cruel.

“I just fed you, didn’t I?” She lifts the baby with a sigh. “Are you really already hungry again?”

The only answer is another piercing wail. She sets the baby against her shoulder and carries it downstairs. At least in the kitchen she’s muffled from the wind, the storm duller and farther away.

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