Pour Baby

Martina was frantic. Where was Ella? Her precious baby girl? The love of her life? One minute the two are enjoying a bath, the next she’s gone.

Ella had just begun crawling, so she can’t have just taken off. Besides, their studio apartment didn’t exactly afford a 6-month-old girl much opportunity to hide. All the closet doors were closed. The oven secure. The fridge door handle impossible to reach.

Martina tore open the cabinets, feeling more and more desperate as each second ticked by. Nothing. She struggled to move the futon away from the wall, one side at a time. Nothing but dust and a few ancient popcorn kernels. She stooped to peer under her computer desk. Empty CD cases, a fuzzy Cheez-It but no Ella. Where the fuck is she!?

Martina began to wonder if she was losing her mind. “Is this how it happens?” she thought. “Do you misplace something here or there and suddenly you’re insane?” Martina even briefly let herself entertain the thought that Ella never existed. That she was a product of Martina’s increasingly diseased consciousness.

Martina looked around the room. Ella’s toys were scattered about. A few brightly colored pieces of plastic designed by “doctors” to stimulate Ella’s intellectual development. The toys surely proved Ella’s existence. Right? Martina looked down at her midsection, pulled out her waistband and saw the C-section scar. “OK, so I’m not crazy,” Martina concluded.

But where was Ella? Where was she?

With a start, Martina made for the apartment’s lone window. En route, her foot caught under the lamp’s cord, causing her to pitch forward and take the lamp with her. Martina quickly recovered, leapt to her feet and bolted toward the open window, a light breeze ruffling the old beige curtains that had been hanging there the day she moved in and likely for decades before that.

Martina thrust her head through the window and looked down to realize what she dread. There, two stories below, was Ella, naked on the soaked pavement, a rubber duck in the grass five feet away and a tangled washcloth draped across the child’s legs.

Martina had thrown the baby out with the bathwater.