I. The Health-Care Worker and the Girls


Shit.  Nobody’s listening.

The health-care worker’s got a room full of Welfare recipients here for the health-and-safety portion of their yearly mandatory job-readiness training, and nobody’s fucking listening.

“THIS IS A FEMALE CONDOM!” she yells, and brandishes the oversized latex tube, flopping like a windsock.

“Dang, that thing’s huge.”

“I’m ‘posed to stick that where?”

“If a man ain’t gonna put on no rubber for me, I sure ain’t doin’ it for him.”

“No man of mine!”

“Show him who’s boss!”

The health-care worker wants to give them another speech about taking their health into their own hands, but last time she tried, those two damn little girls in the middle row just went crazy.

“I’ll just tell ‘im if he don’t care about my health, he can take you-know-what in his own hands,” the blonde one said, and the little brunette got everybody clapping for her.

“Most women actually find them pretty comfortable,” the health-care worker says.  “The only complaint I really get about it is that it squeaks…”

That does it.  Those girls are going wild again.

“Oh, baby, oh… squeeek!” says the blonde one.

“Come on!” the health-care worker snaps.  “You’re acting like teenagers!”

“We are teenagers,” the dark-haired one says, lifting her head from the conference table where she wrote ZEPPELIN RULES in black Sharpie.

“If you’re big enough to make babies, you should be big enough to act like adults and listen.”  The girls shut their mouths and, satisfied, the health-care worker turns around and rummages in her box of safe-sex models.

Then, from somewhere behind her: “Squeeek!”  She slams the diaphragm she’s holding down into the box.  She counts under her breath.  “One… two… three…”

“Squeeek!”


II. The Girls


The two girls go to lunch at the Mexican restaurant across the street.  They like the job classes because Welfare pays for someone to watch their babies while they do it, so they have a minute to breathe with no bottles to heat and no diapers to change.

In the restaurant, they let the waiter seat them and pretend to be poring over the menu while he brings them baskets of chips and salsa.  They fill up on the chips and then just order sodas.

“I think I found a guy for you,” the blonde tells the brunette.  She’s always keeping her eyes out for guys for her friend, because that girl doesn’t seem to have any interest in looking on her own, and that seems weird to her.  She only wants to help her friend be normal.

“What’s he like?” the brunette asks, but she’s just trying to be nice.  She hates these set-ups and usually doesn’t understand what her friend is talking about.  Like how she said about one of her boyfriends: “I like it when he fucks me sideways,” and the brunette doesn’t know how that would work.

She’s got a secret.  She doesn’t even really like boys, and she didn’t want to do it the one time that got her the baby.  Not that she regrets it, of course, because that baby is her destiny, a gift from God who saw her in that high school classroom and knew she was made for better things.

“He’s cool,” the blonde says.  “He’s just not my type.  I told him you’d meet up with him after training.”

“But I have to pick up my baby.”

“So bring the baby with you.  What you think I do, leave mine with the nanny and the housekeeper?”

After the class, the two girls pick up their babies and go to the blonde girl’s house, where she curls the dark-haired girl’s hair with her styling wand and cakes on a rainbow of eyeshadow like hers, a slash of cherry-flavored lip gloss – “Guys like cherry.  It makes ‘em think of sex.”
There’s a knock on the door and the brunette girl opens it.  Squeeek, says the door.  The boy is standing there in a white tank top and thick chain like all the boys in the neighborhood, but he’s not a boy.  He’s a man.  The girl doesn’t know any men.  Her baby’s father was a boy.

The man drapes his arm around the girl’s shoulder.  “Let’s you and me take a little walk,” he says.  Behind her, the blonde girl grins and gives the thumbs-up.

“I hafta take my baby,” the dark-haired girl says, because even if the blonde girl volunteered, she wouldn’t leave her baby with her.  The blonde girl feeds her baby hot dogs.  The brunette’s baby still just drinks breastmilk and her friend thinks that’s weird, but her mama said it was fine.  Her mama said she did it too, as long as she could, because those WIC checks are chickenfeed and breastmilk’s free.

She walks beside him, pushing her umbrella stroller with the little ladybugs on it.  She doesn’t mind him dangling his arm around her but she wishes he’d stop trying to tweak her nipple with the hand that hangs near her breast.

They only walk two blocks, then stop in front of a house.  “What’s this place?” the girl asks.

“This is where I live,” the man says.  “I’d invite you in, but my cousins are in there.  You wanna go for a ride in my car instead?”  He gestures toward one of the two cars in the driveway, the one that has wheels.
The girl folds up the stroller and shoves it in the backseat.  She rides shotgun with the baby in her lap.


III. The Girl and the Man


The man keeps driving until they’re not in town anymore, but even then, he doesn’t stop.  They drive past the landfill and the penitentiary; past the used-tire shop, the twisted wreck of a car that Mothers Against Drunk Driving puts out at the city limits, the septic-tank company lot filled with Port-a-Pottis in different colors, crowded together behind the cyclone fence like a village of tiny houses.

He parks the car in a vacant field just beyond the airport.  When the planes take off, the girl can feel the car shudder from the roof down.  The air smells like cooked garbage from the landfill and worse from the septic service, but whenever a plane lifts off, the smell of aviation fuel mercifully drowns it out.

The girl puts the baby to sleep in the backseat and looks out the window.  Across the field, there’s a cluster of crumbling shells of cabins that were once part of a motel.  The doors and roofs are gone; all that’s left are ghostly white-stucco walls.

She wonders if, when their civilization collapses, these will be the ruins that the new civilization’s archaeologists will search for clues.  She’s gripped with a sudden, strong urge to jump out of the car and run across the field and write her name on those motel walls so that someday, when she’s gone, people will speculate about who she was and figure that she must have really mattered.  Maybe the next civilization will think she was a queen.  Maybe all Nefertiti did was write her name on some pyramid walls.

When the man kisses her, she doesn’t try to stop him.  She knows she’s bad and evil.  He told her he’s got a wife and two kids, one an epileptic toddler who falls down stairs, but his wife won’t sleep with him anymore because she’s pregnant again and mad at him.  They’ll probably get divorced soon, he says, but soon isn’t now so the girl in the car thinks she’s probably going to hell.

The man moves his head down and sucks at the girl’s breasts.  She feels letdown tingling though her nipples and tries to squirm away.  He comes up licking his lips and grinning.  “Good milk,” he says.
She thinks the idea of him drinking her milk is weird, but it also makes her mad.  It’s her baby’s milk.  He’s stealing it.  She doesn’t like boys.  She only loves her baby.  How dare he steal from the only one she loves?

She tells him to take her home.  He says he will when he’s done.  He climbs on top of her and grinds his bones into her.  He’s not really doing it to her, she reasons, because their clothes are still on.  But even through the fabric she can feel the hardness of him, crashing painfully against her.

His shoulder dips near her face, and she bites him.  He sits up, shocked.  She throws the door open and swings her body out, but by the time her flip-flops hit the weeds he’s out of shock and into the chase.  He snatches at the fabric of her blouse, but she’s already out the door.  He shifts into the driver’s seat and guns the engine.

Her baby’s still in the backseat.  She grabs the door handle and digs her heels into the ground.  He’s dragging her, but slowly, teasing.  She gives a firm tug and the door swings open, and she gathers her baby into her arms.  The baby starts to scream.  The girl starts to run.
She sprints toward the ruined motel.  If she can just get inside those walls, she thinks, somehow, everything will be all right.  She’ll disappear into the alternate history where she’s a queen and the archaeologists from the future will break through the disintegrating stucco and save her.

The man swings his car in an arc through the dust, shooting it out from under his tires in a fine spray like red rain.  It covers the girl and her screaming baby where they stand, at the edge of the ruins, watching.  He points the car toward the road and flings something out the back door, slamming it shut behind him.  It hits the dust and sends another cloud flying.  Squeeek!, go the tires, as he revs into gear and speeds off down the road.


IV. The Girl and the Baby


With the baby on her shoulder, the girl walks slowly toward the thing in the dust.  It’s the stroller.  She unfolds it and sets the baby in the seat.  The frame is dented, so the stroller keeps veering toward the ditch.
Still, the girl keeps pushing.  She pushes past the airport, past the Port-a-Potti village, past Mothers Against Drunk Driving’s mangled car, past the used-tire shop, past the penitentiary and the landfill.  The rainbow of makeup that the blonde girl put on her is melting off her face, running and smearing like a rainbow on a gasoline slick.  There’s dust stuck in it.  Her hair is stringy and matted with sweat, and there’s dust in that too.

The baby’s still screaming.  The baby won’t stop screaming.  The girl kicks the back of the stroller.  The baby screams louder.
The girl collapses to her knees in the ditch.  She bends over the stroller, stroking the baby’s hair, kissing the top of the baby’s head.  “I’m so sorry,” she sobs.  “My sweet baby.  I’m so sorry.”  Her tears are slicking down the baby’s hair.  She blows her nose in her skirt with a squeeek! and pulls away the rainbow- and red-dust-swirled fabric.


V. The Health-Care Worker


The health-care worker fumbles through the door with her box of sex-education stuff.  She drops it on the floor; a package of condoms bounces out, and her cat attacks it.

She flops onto her recliner and switches on the TV, surfing through the channels until the cat jumps into her lap and nudges the hand holding the remote control, reminding her to feed him.  She gets up and makes her way to the kitchen.

After she’s fed the cat, the health-care worker just wants to go to bed.  She’s getting tired of trying to teach these people.  They never listen, and they never learn.  Year after year they come, and they’re really all the same.

Squeeek!, say the bedsprings.  And she rolls over and falls asleep.