She wakes up in the night, certain of death by fire. The house is so old, with its decorative crown molding, its stained-glass windows, its knob-and-tube wiring, its bricks in need of re-pointing, its sun-bleached deck gone to splinters and popped nails.
Their first year, they planted a peach tree and guided a trumpet vine up the wrought iron of the front porch. Although they watered it with clockwork frequency, the peach tree never bore fruit.
The trumpet vine, however, grew with abandon. It choked out the honeysuckle and the desert sage. It attracted ants and wasps. It grew alien pods the size of a baby’s arm that emitted a putrid, sweet stench.
The yard has since gone to dust, punctuated in places by bone-white tufts of scorched sod that make a satisfying crunch underfoot.
They’d had the best intentions but weren’t handy and were often tired.
The baby twists away from her, arches its back, and bleats like an animal. Eyes closed, still asleep, it searches for a nipple with its mouth, moving its head side to side. She takes the baby, twists it towards her, positions her nipple into its mouth. The baby clamps down and begins to suckle. Its body relaxes, slackening back into the waters of sleep.
There were days before babies and houses. She barely remembers them. Days before cars, even. Days where she was responsible only for her own body and whatever real estate it occupied on a moving subway car or a cafe seat. And even then, she felt too big, too unwieldy. She spent her evenings constructing complicated diet regimens and exercise routines, planning elaborate self-improvement retreats.
The next morning, as she pins each of her children down in succession and forcibly brushes their teeth, she can still smell smoke. She steps over the baby gate blocking the bathroom door and blows her nose on a square of toilet paper, surveying its contents for soot and finding none.
Later, there is a moment of silence. The silence comes just after a tearful drop-off at preschool but just before the baby in the back seat cuts her lip on a shard of plastic whose origin is a mystery.
In this moment of silence, she thinks, What do I want?
Nothing
And then the baby is crying. There is blood. The first blood ever shed by this tiny body. A contained vessel, punctured. A perfect prick on her upper lip that quivers intact for just a moment before the baby spreads it all over her face with clenched fists and snot and tears.
She stops the car to cry with the baby, gives the baby some milk, apologizes to the baby for how cruel this world can be.
Her thoughts are interrupted by more thoughts. Did she leave the oven on? It’s some strange European model retrofitted to their ancient outlets. Just one spark, and the house would go up like a tinderbox.
She is thinking about the triangle shirtwaist factory fire of 1911. All those women and girls locked in a burning building, then falling like cinders from 10th-floor windows onto the Manhattan sidewalks below. 1911. Wasn’t that the year their house was built? Or was it later?
She pulls the baby to her chest. I’m so sorry, she says. I’m so sorry.
It’s 8:30 on a Wednesday morning in a mid-sized city in the United States. A mother has pulled to the side of the road, commuter traffic roaring past, as she clutches her baby to her chest. She is sobbing and apologizing in turn.
What do you want?
Nothing