The Meaning of Life

Issue 35 • Spring 2017 • Fiction

They’d planned on getting beer from Toby’s, but instead they got a baby, and they were not unhappy about it. Leah and Sarah hadn’t talked about kids yet, but finding one seemed to be a sign that it was time. Besides, being lesbians, this spared them the trouble of adopting or getting one of their friends to have sex with them.

They found the baby in the alley behind their apartment building, close to a gutted couch and confetti and some blood. There’d been a fight outside Toby’s – on stand-up comedy night, of all nights. That was Toby’s. Leah and Sarah noticed the baby’s feet kicking at the inside of its flannel cocoon, and they loved it right away. It was the perfect baby: droopy-cheeked and sullen, with fists barely larger than grapes.

They brought the baby back to their apartment and washed it in the sink. They rubbed it until it was clean and warm and happy. They dried it with a dishtowel and took turns smelling its head; it smelled like green apples from the dish soap.

They wrapped the baby in a sweater and gave him a tour of their apartment. The Christmas tree turned Easter tree. The sudoku corner. The coral bathtub, with its seashell-shaped headrest. The front closet, filled with an incredible collection of Men’s Health magazines left behind by the previous tenant. The baby loved the apartment. It gurgled and touched and put everything in its mouth. When Leah and Sarah asked the baby if he wanted to stay and be their baby, he grabbed their hair in two little fistfuls and yanked down twice – twice for yes.

They made their new baby a bed next to their bed by bundling blankets inside a Rubbermaid bin, but they couldn’t get themselves to put him down. They pressed him between their skins and fell asleep, warm as hams.

*

Jonah, because they’d never met anyone with that name. They had no idea what Jonahs were like, and they liked the element of surprise. They were not going to be the type of parents who call their baby Mozart or Beyoncé. In fact, they immediately agreed that they would not wish any type of success upon Jonah. Life was too short to have that kind of pressure.

They called Leah’s mom first to tell her the news. They told her a desperate woman with no eyes inside her eye holes begged them to take her baby and raise it as their own. They said that because they knew Leah’s mom wouldn’t understand, she’d pester them about not making any efforts to find the parents.

“Babies are expensive,” she pestered them anyway, “how’re you gonna pay for diapers or dentists or, worse, orthodontists? And with Sarah working at that juice bar?”

Leah’s mom thought that because Sarah wore men’s shirts she should be the bread￾winner. She understood nothing about lesbianism, and she understood nothing about them.

“If you don’t try to be more supportive, we’re gonna tell Jonah he only has one grandmother,” Leah said. She hung up.

Sarah’s parents were much cooler. They offered to host a late baby shower, and Leah and Sarah invited all their friends. Leah wore her gold mini dress, and Sarah put on a gold tie to match. They dressed Jonah up in a little white and gold dress they’d taken off a baby Jesus doll at the Salvation Army. 

Leah and Sarah’s friends decided that Jonah was a very cute baby, which meant he’d be an ugly adult. Sarah and Leah didn’t mind. Ugly adults were usually better – like blind people whose hearing developed to be sharp as a detective dog’s, ugly people were forced to learn very good jokes or develop an amazing sense of fashion.

They all sat by the pool in lawn chairs with Sarah’s parents occasionally refilling the chip bowls, and nobody swam. Leah and Sarah’s friends were not the swimming type. They wore thick makeup and boots that took a long time to lace.

“You have to let me do a photo shoot with Jonah,” their friend Liv said. “Anne Geddes meets Marina Abramovic’s Balkan Baroque – an homage to Jonah’s dark provenance.”

Liv was the best thing to have come out of Ms. Grant’s geography class, and Leah told her so. 

“To the most rad aunts and uncles in the world!” Leah cheered. “And to our cute-ass baby!”

They all raised their glasses and took big gulps of their drinks. Leah was drinking lemonade in case her breasts started making milk from being around a baby, but Sarah got sloshed. She kept climbing onto the diving board and threatening to jump if Leah didn’t promise to stay with her until they were so old their asses hung down like sandbags and their pussies smelled like kelp.

They ordered pizza and let their friend Matt give Jonah a little Mohawk with tiny leopard print on the sides of his head. They played electropunk remixes of lullabies.

Later, Sarah’s dad drove them home, and Sarah puked a thin string of puke on the family van’s carpet. When they got home, Sarah and Jonah fell right asleep, but Leah stayed up counting Jonah’s toes over and over again. She kissed his feet until they were purple with lipstick. She wondered if Sarah had realized yet, that he was real.

*

Leah couldn’t stop smelling Jonah’s neck. At the store, on the bus, while changing his diapers. His baby smell was intoxicating, like the smell of permanent markers or very fresh flowers. Sarah found a knitting kit in the dumpster and started making Jonah lots of little socks and hats and tunics, all from the same purple wool. Leah learned to cook. After her shifts at the café, she’d come home and soak bread in milk and sugar to make soft pudding that Jonah could eat. She stewed apples with cinnamon, for vitamins and because it made their apartment smell like a candle store. She thawed frozen peas and puréed them with the heel of her hand.

Things were like that, when Jonah was a baby. Soft, warm, easy. They spent all their free time playing: dress-up and tickle fights and spin the baby’s bottle. They all loved those coloring books that came with a single clear pen, the pen’s wetness turning black and white pictures into bright paintings. Those books were especially good for Jonah, who was pretty bad at coloring inside the lines. 

Then, one day, when he was two, Jonah got an ear infection. Leah and Sarah had avoided going to the doctor until then, but this time there was no way around it. Jonah’s upper lip and chin were permanently caked with snot from crying all the time. His little child body was flushed and holding him felt like holding a hot water bottle. They took him to the walk-in clinic by their house and claimed to have lost Jonah’s health care card.

“No problem,” the receptionist said, “I’ll look him up in the system.”

 “Fuck the system,” Sarah thought to say, “we hate the system. The system is oppressive and one day the world will return to its natural state of anarchy.”

The woman blinked her big brown eyes.

“Just have a seat, please.”

The doctor was a short old guy with really long eyebrows. He was grumpy with them, told them that even anarchist parents had to make sure their child could have access to health care. He sent them out with a hand-written prescription for antibiotics.

In the lobby, they thanked the nice receptionist and promised her that they were going to try to accept organized society. When they turned around, Jonah was throwing magazines on the ground and a lady in a pinstriped jacket was looking at him funny. She had lots of makeup around her eyes and on her forehead, and deep creases were forming in it from how much she was frowning. Sarah picked up Jonah and apologized to the lady. As they left the clinic and turned the corner into the alley where they’d found Jonah, they heard the lady yell: “Hey, where’d you get that baby?”

“We got the baby in the normal way of giving birth to him!” is what they should have answered, but instead they started running. That was a bad call. The lady’s inner predator kicked in and she charged them like a provoked pit bull. She had calves like bricks, so thick the nylon around them was stretched almost invisible. She caught up to them almost instantly, grabbing Sarah by the sweater so tightly her knuckles turned white. She was breathing hard and her face was red like a demon’s. From a distance, she had looked like the kind of lady Leah and Sarah would never talk to: a business executive or a paralegal, someone who lived in a nifty condo with chrome appliances. From up close, though, they could see that the skin under her makeup was leathery, that her too-tight bun was held together by a purple elastic threaded with silver tinsel, that her skirt suit wasn’t so much navy as the tired color of a varicose vein. She was a fraud, which meant that she was one of them, which meant that she was no more entitled to having a baby than they were.

“Where’d you get that baby?” the lady asked again.

“You can’t have him,” Sarah said. Another faux pas. She may as well have said finders keepers. 

Leah got a feeling like a cold glass of water down the back. This was the feeling she got when she sensed a manager trailing her through the aisles of a department store and her skirt was full of perfume bottles and lacy underwear. She yanked the woman’s bun back and the woman collapsed like a folding patio chair. She gave her a swift kick between the shoulder blades and grabbed Sarah by the hand. They ran down the alley, dodging tire rims and broken glass and rotting cabbage. When they looked back, the woman was trying to sit up on her knees, a palm on the back of her neck. Her eyes didn’t know where to be in their sockets.

Sarah pulled Leah into the yard of an apartment building that wasn’t theirs. They snuck around to their own building, half a block down. Leah was pretty turned on by how clever Sarah was, throwing the woman off their tracks like that. When they got back to their apartment, they calmed their sweet baby and didn’t waste one second after he was asleep to start fucking like astronauts who just came back from a mission and actually survived and took off their space suits and were suddenly irresistibly bare and fleshy, floating around their tiny tin-can room. They loved everything about this situation. They loved having a baby, yes, but they also loved being felons. They liked lying and devising plans. They liked that they had a nemesis, and they loved being each other’s partners in crime.

When Jonah woke up from his nap, they did the thing where they put all the pillows, cushions and blankets they owned on the living room floor and lay down on them. They poured chocolate chips into their palms and ate them with their pinkies up, as if they were tiny appetizers. They made shadow puppets with brown, sticky hands. They looked at some picture books and did whatever they wanted. When Sarah had to leave for her evening shift, she kissed their baby on his face for five minutes, then she kissed Leah deep and put her hands in Leah’s underwear, stroking her bum. Leah and Sarah really did respond well to adversity.

*

“She’s out there,” Sarah said when she came back that night. It was midnight and raining. Leah took off Sarah’s wet coat and hung it on the back of a chair.

“Who?” Leah asked. She didn’t want to believe it. 

“She’s just sitting out in her car. I had to come in through the back. She looks demented.”

Sarah’s lips were purple from the cold. Her nostrils pulsed open and closed like little jellyfish: she was worried. Leah took Sarah by the hand and pulled her onto the couch, wrapping her arms and legs around her from behind, like a backpack.

“She’ll go away,” she said in Sarah’s ear. “Let’s go to sleep. When we wake up, she’ll be gone.”

*

She wasn’t gone. She was leaning back in the passenger’s seat of her car with her feet up on the dashboard. She was there as they ate their Corn Pops, did their morning aerobics tape, had their morning bath. 

She was still there when Leah came back from work around dinner time. She was there when they went to bed. The following morning, they cracked the blinds and there she was, wiping something off her windshield with a napkin.

She’d spend the whole day on their street, sitting in her old grey Camry for hours on end. Sometimes she’d step out and circle some buildings, or she’d get on her knees in the middle of the street and say please, please with her hands clasped over her heart. She’d drive off late at night and be there again the next morning. 

At first it was fun to sneak around like spies whenever they left the house, but, after a few days, the woman’s presence started getting to them. Leah and Sarah didn’t exactly feel bad for the woman – she had, after all, abandoned Jonah in an alley – but her whimpers, her increasingly purple eyelids, the way her knees quivered sadly when she walked: it all filled them with a sort of unspecific dread. They started leaving the apartment less often. They kept the blinds closed. They stopped taking Jonah to the park, and if he cried too loud they all huddled into the bathroom, stuffing towels under the door so the sound wouldn’t seep out into the street.

*

It was Wednesday night, almost two weeks after their trip to the clinic. Sarah and Leah had planned a parent meeting. Until then, parent meetings had meant coming up with fun new games to play or sharing intel about where to score free baby stuff. Not this time.

They’d thought the woman would have given up by then, but they were starting to worry she never would. The day before, she’d gone into the alley, written down GIVE ME BACK MY BOY in blue chalk and stood over it, screaming like a burning witch.

“Maybe we should move,” Leah said through a mouthful of digestive cookies.

“And leave our apartment? The best apartment in the world? No way. Anyway, we’ll never be able to get Jonah’s drawings off the floor and we can’t afford to pay the damages.” 

“So what do we do? I’m not giving up our baby,” Leah said.

“Murder?” Sarah said.

“I don’t know, lovebum. I don’t think I’m mentally ready to take a human life. Besides, if we got caught, we’d go to jail and Jonah would grow up in the system. I’m not sure what exactly the deal is with the system, but I’m pretty sure cute babies don’t belong there.”

They sat in silence, dipping cookies in chocolate milk. Sarah drew a small arrow on the able, and another arrow, and another. She did this when she was deep in thought.

“If you know yourself but not the enemy,” Sarah started, “for every victory gained you will also suffer a defeat.”

“Sun Tzu. Are you saying we should learn more about her? Follow her?”

“Maybe. I mean, we have the advantage. She can’t see us, but we can see her.”

And they could see her right then through a slit in the blinds, sitting in her car and mouthing the words to some unknowable song, deep half-moons carved out under her eyes by the yellow street lamp. They could feel her presence like a mop bucket weakly but relentlessly slopping all over their shoes.

*

Sarah asked her parents to babysit and borrowed a coworker’s car for the night. Leah and her hid under an old wool blanket on the backseat, parked three cars behind the old Camry. They played a game where they made each other cum and had to stay very still and quiet. By midnight, they were so exhausted they almost didn’t notice when the Camry’s tail lights turned on. Sarah climbed into the driver’s seat with her hood down to her nose and Leah joined her, sinking low in the passenger seat. They followed the Camry slowly, from a distance, through the dark potholed streets of their neighborhood. The woman pulled into the driveway of an old brick bungalow only a dozen blocks from their apartment. Sarah pulled over and had to parallel park, but the woman didn’t seem to notice. She walked around the side of the house and down a small staircase, into the basement. Leah and Sarah walked across the wet grass and crouched on either side of a small slit of basement window.

*

Brenda poured the milk first, filled the top third of the glass with Kahlúa. She stuck her finger deep into the glass and swirled until it was homogenous brown – adult Nesquik. The first gulp pulled her back into herself, into her clothes, into her basement apartment with its old humming refrigerator, bluish ceiling lights, the beautiful Christmas tablecloth she’d inherited from her grandmother and used year-round because it was so sturdy, the reds and greens and oranges so rich.

“Who’s winning?” she managed to say.

“It’s a tie,” Ken said, looking at the television. “Did you find your kid yet?”

“Don’t you go calling him my kid, Ken. He’s your kid, too. Don’t you go denying that.”

“Fine, fine, sorry I asked,” Ken answered. “What’s for dinner?”

“There’s chicken in the fridge. Why don’t you get off your ass and warm it yourself,” Brenda said, opening the fridge and peeling saran wrap from a dish of chicken covered in cream of mushroom. She scooped two chicken breasts and two dollops of mashed potatoes onto plates, microwaved them one at a time.

“Your job called. They’re wondering when you plan on going back. ‘Soon,’ I told ‘em. Didn’t seem to believe me. Go figure.”

“I’ll go back when I have my boy. If they don’t like it, they can shake a can of Coke and squeeze it up their tight asses.”

Truth was, Brenda didn’t want to go back to work. She couldn’t stamp another passport application, force another customer service smile, put on another stiff skirt that dug into her waist and left deep red grooves in her sides. Since finding out that Lucas was alive and safe, she’d started to feel herself slowly come back to life. Out of all the scenarios she’d imagined – Lucas being eaten by alley dogs, being kidnapped by psychopaths who chained him up in their backyard and made him drink his own urine – the thought that two teenaged dykes found and claimed him had never crossed her mind. What a joke. Knowing that the only thing standing between her and her Lucas was a couple of anarchist idiots filled her with hope. It was only a matter of time until they gave themselves away, and she’d be right there when they did. 

Besides, sitting in that car all day allowed her to connect with herself, to think her thoughts and figure out how she really felt about things. The answer was that she felt like life had decided to make the space above her head its toilet seat. She looked like shit, felt like shit, probably smelled like shit and, irony of all ironies, hadn’t herself taken a proper shit in at least two weeks, making her acutely aware of all the shit piling up in her gut every time she took a bite of buttered bagel, had a bowl of minestrone, got up in the night to eat an Ah Caramel in fucking 

peace. There must have been at least six chicken breasts sitting in her gut at that very moment, and there were about to be seven. Brenda took a steaming bite of mushroom chicken.

Realizing that she felt like shit was a bit better than feeling like shit and not realizing it. It meant that if she started to punch her steering wheel, she knew why she was punching it. If she started to slap herself in the head, looking up to the sky and asking god to please let everyone in the world eat their own fucking faces off, she knew that she was doing it because she was in a difficult place, emotionally. And who wouldn’t be, in her situation? The same scene had been replaying in her head for almost two years. Bringing baby Lucas to karaoke night wrapped in a flannel blanket because babysitters were expensive and she couldn’t stay in that damned basement one second longer. Why should Ken get to have all the fun? Brenda needed a fucking drink once in a while too. Ken mouthing off at Toby’s, as usual, shouting “Get off the stage, faggot!” to some kid who, it turns out, actually was a faggot, the kind with a tear tattoo and boxing gym arms. The kid had taken Ken out to the alley and punched him until his face didn’t look like his face. The kid kept hitting and hitting – Brenda had never seen so much blood. Then he’d started dragging Ken down the sidewalk by his shoe, saying homophobic fuckers like him didn’t deserve to live. That had scared her, really scared her. She didn’t much like Ken herself, but the idea of living without him made the ground wobble under her feet and the sky press down on her head. She’d hid the baby in a corner of the alley and had gone after Ken. “Help!” she’d screamed like a twit. As if people weren’t already seeing what was happening, as if they hadn’t already made the decision to stay out of it. She’d tried to pull on Ken’s leg, get the kid to let go of it, but the kid had kicked her off like a dog. She’d fallen to the ground and hit her head on a fire hydrant. The rest was fuzzy.

She’d come to on a stretcher in some hospital hallway, doctors and nurses running around her like clean chickens. She’d walked right out of the hospital, hailed a cab she couldn’t pay for and gotten off at Toby’s to find the alley empty, with nothing but blood and confetti where her baby should have been. That night, Ken had come home from the hospital and the two of them had beat the shit out of each other. They’d looked pathetic, swinging at each other and missing half the time, dizzy from concussions and pain medication. Still, it was the first and only time they’d hit each other, and they’d made it count.

The following day, they’d wept next to each other in bed, disinfecting wounds and icing bruises. The day after, Ken had gone back to work, proudly parading his black eyes and casts, and had seemed to forget about Lucas completely. Brenda hadn’t stopped crying – not for days, weeks, months. 

“They’ll put you in jail for neglect or some shit,” Ken had said when Brenda tried calling the police. “They’re not gonna do anything to find him. Why should they care? You’re not pretty enough to be in the paper.” 

Eventually, grief had turned to numbness and time had gone by like a really strong wind, sweeping her up and carrying her like an empty bag of chips.

Brenda finished her plate of chicken and brought it to her mouth, licking it clean of sauce, getting every last smear of mashed potato.

“Can you not eat like a pig in a god damned barn?” Ken said.

She was done, anyway. She went to their room and took off her jeans. As she was taking off her bra, she noticed shuffling outside the window. She looked up to see the two dykes with their hands over their eyes, cringing as if they’d bitten into a lemon. God, her tits weren’t that bad! They were holding up pretty well for forty-two. She threw on her oversized Labatt t-shirt and bolted out of the apartment, lunging across the grass and landing on the girls, whose young bodies crunched under her like a pile of kittens. The girls screamed and swore and tried to roll away, but she’d grabbed them both by the hair and had their faces mashed into the muddy Ground.

“Give me back my fucking baby boy!” she roared. “Where are you hiding him? That’s MY boy!”

“We’re not telling you anything!” the more feminine one screeched.

“That’s what you think,” Brenda said. She yanked them up by the hair and dragged them into her apartment. “Get the duct tape, Ken. Those are the little bitches that stole our fucking baby.”

Brenda sat the girls down on some kitchen chairs and Ken came to tape them up. By the time he was done, they couldn’t even lift their pinky fingers. In times like these, Brenda was happy to have Ken around.

“What do we do?” Ken asked.

“I don’t know,” Brenda admitted, out of breath.

“Should I take out my knife? Bleed it out of them?”

“That’s not a bad idea. Girls, what do you think? Is it worth losing an ear to keep playing house with my boy?”

The girls didn’t move.

“Well, Ken, looks like these two little rug munchers aren’t too attached to their ears. Guess it makes sense their ears shouldn’t be attached to them.”

Ken got his pocket knife out of his leather jacket and slowly walked towards the girls. He licked his teeth to seem threatening, but he just looked like an old fool sucking on his dentures. Brenda tried to hide her embarrassment.

“Last chance, girls. Are you gonna give me back my boy?” Brenda asked.

The girls shook their heads and squeezed their eyes shut. One of them started humming. started pushing down. Blood began dripping on her shoulder.

“Jesus, Ken! Don’t actually cut off their ears, you sick fuck!” Brenda pushed him off the girl who was sobbing now, snot dripping over her mouth tape.

Brenda couldn’t believe she’d married such a dipshit. He’d looked thrilled at the thought of hurting these two dumb-looking girls, fucking monster.

“Whatever,” Ken said, and went back to the couch to watch the hockey game. “Come on! Just shoot, you prairie sissy!”

Brenda got a first aid kit from the bathroom. She cleaned the back of the girl’s ear with gauze and alcohol, put a band-aid on the wound. The two girls were sobbing, their whole bodies trembling. 

“Alright, alright, calm down. Let’s not be overdramatic,” Brenda said, her own eyes filling with tears.

One tear escaped, then another, and suddenly she was curled up at the girls’ feet, wailing like a baby. One of the girls reached out her foot and started stroking Brenda’s back with her toes. It felt nice, soothing. Brenda hadn’t been touched like that for a long time, not since her mother had passed away. She put her head on the feminine girl’s lap and wept even harder. The girls made a muffled “aww” sound through the duct tape on their mouths.

“I just miss my boy so much,” Brenda blubbered.

The girls made the “aww” sound again, tilting their heads.

“Will you give him back to me?” Brenda asked, wiping her nose with her hand. She reached up to peel the duct tape off their mouths.

“No,” one girl said.

“No way,” the other agreed.

“But maybe you could come over for a visit sometime, if you promise to be nice. What do you think, Sarah?” the feminine one said.

“I’m not sure we can trust her,” Sarah said. “Ma’am, you left a baby in an alley. A dangerous alley with blood and stinky garbage and sharp objects. Do you know how irresponsible that is? Leah and I aren’t sure you’re the kind of person we want around our child.”

“It wasn’t my fault!” Brenda protested. “My fucking husband got into a bar fight, I thought they were going to kill him!”

“Okay, but why would you raise a child with the kind of person who gets into bar fights?” Leah said. “Honestly, this guy looks like a Grade A asshole. Is he seriously watching hockey right now?” 

“That’s pretty inappropriate, considering the circumstances,” Sarah agreed.

“Suck on that puck, you hick faggot!” Ken yelled.

Brenda looked up at the girls, whose young faces suddenly seemed so wise, like two lesbian angels who had come to tell her the good news, or at least to call her out on her shit. 

“You’re right,” she said, “my husband’s a dink. Did you know he gave our son beer one time? In his bottle? So he would to go sleep already?”

“Oh my god,” Leah said.

“Oh my fucking god,” Sarah said.

“I know,” Brenda said.

“Why are you even still with him?” Leah asked.

“Yeah, why?” Sarah asked.

“Honestly, I don’t know. I never thought I’d be this kind of woman, you know? I never thought I’d have to wipe chip crumbs off the couch three times a day or drop my puke-covered husband into the bath when he comes back from the bar. But before I knew how I got here, this was my life, and it was the only thing I had. It felt like leaving my life would be admitting there was nothing good about it, that I would be better off having nothing than having the few things I had. It sounds dumb, I know.”

“No way, that totally makes sense,” Leah said.

“Yeah, that’s a rough spot to be in. Don’t be so hard on yourself,” Sarah said.

“You two are so nice,” Brenda said. “You seem like a really sweet couple. I still wish you hadn’t stolen my Lucas, though.”

“You seem really nice too,” Sarah said. “But his name is Jonah.”

“Jonah,” Brenda said. “That’s a pretty name.”

“You know,” Leah said, “I’m getting a good feeling about all of this. I think we can make it work.”

“Yeah?” Brenda said.

“Yeah,” the two girls said, looking down at her with their soft, nurturing faces.

Brenda got some scissors from the kitchen and cut their tape off carefully. They sandwiched her into a warm hug, and Brenda felt her heart unfurl. 

“Wanna come see our apartment?” Leah asked.

“Sure,” Brenda answered. “I’d like that. Let me just pack my things first. I don’t think I’ll be coming back here.”

“No problem,” Sarah said, “take your time. And make sure you grab that tablecloth. That’s a real nice tablecloth.”

*

Brenda happened to be really good a sudoku. She agreed that the apartment had a really good vibe. She also loved how much of her son was in the apartment. She could scan the floors and see the evolution of her son’s artistic talent, which, if she was honest, was nothing to write home about – people, alligators, houses, there was no telling what anything was. 

The girls set up the couch for Brenda and told her she could stay as long as she wanted – in fact, they wouldn’t mind some help with the rent. Sarah went to pick up Jonah from her parents’ house while Leah and Brenda hung out in the living room. They made rum and cokes and talked about the meaning of life. It was hard to say what the meaning of life was. Maybe nature, or friendship. Definitely not money, but maybe science or technological advancement.

When Jonah came home, they all played a game of Candy Land. Jonah liked the colors, but he didn’t really get the game, so Brenda was put in charge of taking his little hand and helping him move the pieces on the board. Later, they all had Jonah’s favorite dessert, which was frozen yogurt with chocolate syrup and jam on it.

They helped Brenda unpack her things and decided they should all have a sleepover in the living room. Jonah fell asleep against Brenda’s chest, and the three moms stayed up late talking in hushed voices. Leah and Brenda asked Sarah what she thought the meaning of life was, and Sarah said she thought there was no meaning to life – she identified as a nihilist.

“For me, I think it’s love,” Brenda said.

“I’m with Brenda,” Leah decided. “Love.”

“Interesting theory,” Sarah conceded. “I guess if there was a meaning to life, maybe it’d be love.”

Issue 53 • Spring 2026

Fiction

Poetry

Fiction

Poetry