Flight Risk

by Jen Larsen

He decides a baby is the answer. The baby is plaster and lathe over cracked brick, a rickety, newborn bridge, a pair of handcuffs. The baby, he thinks. The baby.

She drinks nothing but seltzer. She swallows the air. He urges steak on her, potatoes and meatloaf, pineapple upside-down cake and caramel apples. Sticky things, heavy things. “Eat,” he says. He clutches at her hand. She shakes her head at him and drifts away from the dinner table. His forehead crumples and his shoulders tumble down. She grows larger and lighter.

He wishes she were happy. Instead, she is buoyant, giddy and strange. She doesn’t lumber the way other pregnant women do.  She steps lightly, floats up the stairs. She never trips; she glides. She sleeps on her back now, her stomach straining up toward the ceiling fan, the sky light. It could break through the glass and drag her soaring through the sky, arms and legs dangling and limp, her enormous belly taking her away. He sleeps downstairs on the couch and wonders if she’ll be there in the morning.

When she goes into labor, she begins to laugh. She holds her belly and doubles over. Her laughter fills up the living room, bursts like bubbles in his ears. She laughs through delivery, and he sits in the corner, grim. The baby comes quickly, and when they spread her out naked for weighing on the cold scale, she bounces up and wafts through the sterile air of the hospital room. The baby glances off the corner of the room and glides across the face of the overhead lights. She casts a tiny shadow.

“I’ll get a step stool,” one nurse says, backing out of the room. The doctor sits on the floor. On the labor table, emptied out and hollow, she laughs. He stands and watches his child rotating slowly under the air vent, far above his head.

She will not let him touch their baby. She holds the baby in the crook of her arm. She holds her by the heel. She sits and looks at her floating above. She puts on her housecoat and goes out into the yard. She ignores him. She ignores the neighbors lining their driveways and yards. Clutching the baby’s heel, holding tight, she lifts up on to her tiptoes and reaches upwards, waiting for a strong enough gust of wind.