Here is the first story that we wrote in fiction writing. I am under the impression that it came out a lot better than our teacher seemed to think it came out, so please tell me your (possibly honest) opinion.
Distance
When Christine showed up at the door, the first things she noticed were the azaleas on the doorstep in desperate need of watering. It hadn’t rained in a few months, so perhaps it was excusable, but Christine knocked on the door slowly, with a growing annoyance at having to be here on a Friday night, mixing with her irritation at uncared for plants. Although she had nowhere else to be tonight, other than her studio apartment with its sloppily painted walls and a quickly deteriorating sofa bed, these jobs always made her feel more than inadequate. The door opened with the same reluctance Christine felt, but the parents thrust their baby into her hands with excessive enthusiasm. Just for this she hated them a little, but she knew that her kind were hard to find—an adult, not a teenager, who had a college education and suggested in advertisements that she planned to become a teacher, even if that was not the whole truth.
“Our phone numbers are next to the fridge, and so is the doctor’s number, and he’s already eaten but if he gets hungry there are some jars in the cupboard next to the microwave and thank you so much for doing this. Good night!” Parents often spoke in run-on sentences that drifted in and out of Christine’s ears; in their desperation to leave the house, which mingled with worry about the wellbeing of their child, speaking was never at the top of the priority list. She nodded in what she hoped was a polite, not surly, manner, and looked for the first time at the baby whose pudgy limbs were entangled in her arms.
He was looking up at her with wide eyes, and his expression was impossible to read. He could have been about to cry or scream, and if she didn’t feel him breathing in her arms he could have been dead. They stayed that way for a few moments, looking at one another, blank, irritable, mirror-images, and then he kicked out with one chubby leg, breaking the moment. Christine carried him over towards the sofa, and placed him on his back. He began making gurgling sounds in the back of his throat. She turned away, suddenly nauseous.
It was the little things that made her angry—the inability to walk without stumbling, the drool that dripped incessantly onto the clothes of the carrier, the constant incomprehension of instructions. Then there were the aspects of babyhood that disgusted her, made her want to drop the child she was carrying and leave—the throwing up on shoulders, the perpetually sticky face and hands, the crying that seemed to be on call for every baby she had ever cared for. They tired her, all children did, and she would never be a teacher in an elementary school, or find a job in child care, when anybody who spent over an hour with her realized that her disgust for babies was ever-present and threatening.
Christine walked to the sink, where dirty dishes were piled in precarious towers. She wondered if she was expected to wash them, and suddenly felt so exhausted that she sat down on the floor of the kitchen. She stared at the magnets on the fridge, wishing that they spelled out a sign, but the letters were only arranged in random orders—FCRBOHJGW—and she closed her eyes, memorizing the room. When she opened her eyes the room, only two seconds later, looked different than she remembered it—the light was too bright, the lines too sharp.
Disoriented, she heard the hiccupping coughs of the baby, signifying that he was about to begin crying. She got to her feet, rubbing the small of her back, and made her way over to the baby. She got there before he started crying completely, and he immediately stopped his short, breathless tears, and gazed up at her, searching her face for signs of comfort. Finding none, he immediately started wailing. She bobbed him up and down in her arms, looking around the room for any props that would quiet him. Seeing a pile of plastic toy dinosaurs in the corner of the room, she carried him over to them. She picked one up and waved it in front of his face. The dinosaur felt waxy in her hands, and the surprising smoothness of it made her feel the strange urge to sink her teeth into its rounded, ridged body.
Instead, she handed it to the baby, who proceeded to gum the head of the dinosaur. She looked at the clock, and back at him, his saliva dripping into the body of the green dinosaur. It was a diplodocus, her least favorite type of dinosaur. She got up to check if there was any milk in the refrigerator, feeling useless, needing something to do with her hands. This baby was surprisingly agreeable, and she felt her worthlessness in every moment he did not need a caretaker. Christine thought of her mother, feeding her, rocking her, changing her diapers, and most tiring of all, unconditionally loving her.
She retrieved a bottle from the fridge, and handed it to the baby, who eagerly drank from the bottle. Christine’s voice felt like she had never used it, when in fact it had just been a few hours of silence. She needed to clear her throat. She rocked the baby back and forth, the bottle in his mouth. His eyelids fluttered, then began to blink shut, the bottle falling as if in slow motion out of his hand, her eyes not seeing it falling until it was on the ground. She felt a wave of nausea come over her, and suddenly she had to get out of this house. She looked at her watch. The baby’s parents would return in only ten minutes, and his eyes were shut, his chest moving rhythmically up and down. Her mother’s voice echoed in her ear: “You’re not like me, Christine. You won’t have any children.” Her desire to prove her mother wrong in every way flared up inside her, but died down just as quickly, the fight emptying out of her through her tired fingertips. She wanted to scream.
When the baby’s parents returned home at 10:00, he would be in his crib, sleeping softly, fingers curled around a green plastic diplodocus, a note next to him.
I’m sorry for leaving, there was an emergency. I left at 9:50. You don’t have to pay me.
- Christine
Christine lay on her fold out couch, staring up at the ceiling, trying to summon up the tiredness that had overcome her earlier into a sleep, but her legs were itching to run.
