Art by Oakland Galbraith
Story by Jenessa Abrams
Last night when I returned from fucking my ex-husband, I made pancakes. It was just before midnight. I timed it that way. I didn’t want to see his face when it officially became our daughter’s birthday. I wanted to watch my stove, wanted to turn all the burners on and wait for the kitchen to fill with that smell of gas and oil.
Living alone makes aromas mean something.
The skillet was scratched in all the places I used the wrong knife trying to cut through raw pieces of chicken. I dropped in a slice of butter and let it slide over the markings. As it melted, I walked into the entryway.
Every year on this day, we play a game of helicopter. In the old house, we’d fling our arms out and whirl around the living room. We’d spin until one of us knocked the other over.
In my apartment, I stand between the hall and the bathroom making tight circles, whipping my head around like a dog chasing its tail. I spin until I can no longer see the cardboard boxes stacked against the walls. I see only blackness instead.
I live for these moments of nothingness.
Hours later I wake up on the floor. The building hasn’t burned to the ground and I haven’t died from the fumes.
I return to the kitchen to face the stove. The pan is black with charcoal, but it is the only one I have. My eyes can barely open. I feel around in the sink for a bowl. As I gather flour, eggs, and sugar together, I think about my mother. We haven’t spoken in some time, but days like this were her favourite. She would buy out the local drugstore and fill our tiny home with shiny red and gold balloons.
I pour the batter into the shape of a K in the pan, just like she would’ve. The dough at the top of the letter oozes together. An R forms in its place. Fuck. I stab the cast iron with my spatula and toss the excess onto the counter.
I’m already late for my first shift as Wonder Conductor.
For the past few months I’ve worked the register at Toy Wonderland during the hours where kids run down the aisles and pick up toys and yell at their parents and throw Barbie dolls and LEGO and Hot Wheels. I’ve rung them up. I’ve given out stickers. I’ve listened to a boy with a birthmark on his cheek tell his mother that the plush frog he was cradling had been separated from its family. The boy said: It doesn’t have a home anymore. We should adopt it! His mother said: Adoption costs too much money and plucked the green stuffed animal from his arms. The boy and I were both disheartened.
Working a party will be different. I pull the new uniform over my head and study my reflection above the sink. I look like a cross between a candy striper and a plumber. There wasn’t any time for my boss Fred to train me, so I have to depend on Brigitte, the twenty-year-old. This should infuriate me. It does. But sometimes anger is too exhausting. There are too many things that make me want to scream.
I lift the K pancake from the skillet and place it in a Tupperware before I leave.
On the subway platform, a dead-eyed woman hands me the morning cartoons. Her scratchy solicitation plays again and again on a loop. Want the news? Here’s the news. The Tupperware knocks around in my purse. I imagine the pancake folding into itself and the K becoming disjointed pieces of dough.
When the train comes, I shuffle toward a vacant spot by the doors.
The paper features a story on some politician cheating on his wife. Between an ad for antidepressants and a montage of notable nuptials, I see the headline: P.S. 164 to put in new playground after storm. I stare at the words for a while.
In elementary school, when I was old enough not to believe in Santa Claus, but too young to know why, a girl fell backwards on the swing set during recess. She landed on her head and lay motionless, like a snow angel when the wind makes the frost move. I stood high above on this big hill, holding the top of a wood fence, playing God. Some ugly part of me hoped she would die; tragedy was still something of a fantasy. I thought about the rising in my stomach that day, the excitement, this maniac high achieved just by thinking: I could witness true calamity. It intoxicated me. When my tiny hands gripped the railing, I had no concern for splintering. I thought death was like the snow globe shaken too hard in the hands of my father. Angry. Wanting to scatter the streets with white confetti. I thought it was beautiful. I hadn’t considered its permanency. Then the recess bell sounded and the girl didn’t die. I was left disappointed.
The fluorescent lighting in this subway car is getting to me. A little girl with bug eyes stares up from her mother’s lap. I turn my head away. The paper drops from my hand and descends in folded sheets.
“La-a-ady!” The girl singsongs to me, “Da pappa.” She points frantically.
I pretend not to see.
“Da pappa! You gonna lose it.”
The train doors open. I unzip my coat and try to catch my breath as people push in around me. Only four stops to Toy Wonderland. I slide into a seat at the opposite end of the car. When we enter the tunnel, the lights flicker; everything gets dim.
I remove the Tupperware from my bag and stare down at the pancake. The K is somewhat intact, if I lie to myself and squint concurrently. I lift the thing in my hands as an elderly woman to my left sneezes.
“Bless you,” I mutter, before biting into it.
She turns to face me. If she weren’t wearing so much makeup, her cheeks would probably turn rosy. “Oh, how sweet,” she says, pointing to the pancake. “Made special for you?”
I wipe grease from my cheek. “For my daughter.”
The woman smiles, revealing lipstick on her teeth. “How old?”
I swallow a bite of pancake. “Today she would have been nine.”
“Oh.” The woman leans away.
I think about making her feel better. It’s all right, really or it was a long time ago, the talking actually makes it easy. But it doesn’t and we don’t say anything. We sit and listen to the screech of the subway grates as I eat more of the pancake meant for Katilyn. Then the woman gets off, maybe at the wrong stop, so she can stop sitting next to me.
Before I walk in, I get a text from Brigitte that says Fred is having a coronary. All the ugly parts of me are happy. Unfortunately, before I can respond, I see Fred is right in front of me, banging on the glass doors, mouthing: Get in here. Even if something had happened to him, he’d have left instructions for Toy Wonderland to shut down in his absence. He’d prefer losing all his money than having those mothers miss out on his Fredceptional service.
“MWB,” he told me one afternoon when there was a rush of women in line for the new Dance Party Barbie. “Mommies With Bodies.”
“You mean MILF?” I said, slinking back into a teddy bear display. “Moms I’d Like to Fuck?”
“Fuck,” he mouthed, placing his finger to his lips, “is an adult word. We don’t talk like that in here.”
When I first saw Toy Wonderland, I felt like I was entering a cartoon. Everything is oversized: there are giant candy bars stuffed with beans and colossal plastic chairs. All the colours are too bright. The shelves are overflowing, like the way presents under a Christmas tree look in a movie. I understood quickly that the overflow had more to do with defeat than intention; restocking is time-consuming and children are unpredictable. But excess can be comforting.
Fred says: The more people see, the more they feel is lacking. I told him that was manipulation and he told me that was marketing.
The two are the same thing; this is how you sell a fantasy.
We are in a converted warehouse that is one part toy store, one part party playhouse, Fred’s words again. In the playhouse, there are four wings: the Dining Chamber for pizza and mac and cheese, the Papier-Mâché Forest for the exploratory child who seeks adventure in the confines of the city, the Barbie and Superhero Centre for the intersection between male and female identity; and Music Alley with a massive piano that plays techno music when you press down on the keys. It horrifies the more traditional parents and makes all the children with piano teachers squeal with glee.
Our latest attraction is the bear-stuffing machine. Fred converted the backroom so we could compete with the new play gym that opened up downtown. Now the kids have the power to make their own stuffed animals. The machine, a repurposed model Fred ordered off the internet, is twice the length of a movie theatre popcorn maker and built almost identically. Both have metal bottoms for the mechanical elements and glass tops to display the contents. Behind the glass, instead of popcorn, there are mounds of fluffy white cotton. In the centre, there is a spout like a gas pump that you attach to the teddy bear.
“Where have you been?”
Fred has his hands on my shoulders.
“I didn’t forget the hat,” I say, as I fish my Wonder Conductor cap out from under the Tupperware in my bag. “See?”
As Fred drags me to the Dining Chamber, I wink at Brigitte who’s on a ladder, stringing pompoms. She bites her thumb in response. The counters are covered in cotton candy tablecloths. The fabric is shiny and puffy; it will be impossible to eat without spilling food or ripping the material. Kid friendly, I think.
“There’s an emergency, Sadie.” Fred draws in a breath. “The bear-stuffing machine is broken. And as you know: with no machine, there are no bears. With no bears, there’s no closing activity. With no closing activity, there’s no—”
“What do you expect me to do?”
“Are you joking? Sadie, if that play gym hadn’t stolen my best staff, you know you wouldn’t be here.”
I force my mouth into a smile, “But now you’re in a bind and offering competitive pay!”
I have become a recording. I am only capable of small things like repeating what is said to me and pretending that inside I am not crumbling.
Fred straightens the Wonder Conductor cap.
“Now make yourself useful. What are we going to do?”
“We’ll wing it.” I nod, trying to convince myself. “Instead we’ll do something in Music Alley. The kids can perform.”
“Sadie, Sasha’s mother will be here any minute, I can’t tell her we’re going to wing it, what does that even mean?”
“To improvise, Fred. They’re kids. If we tell them there’s a performance, they’ll be excited. Kids love surprises.”
“How would you know?” He smacks his head with his hand and circles another corner of the room. “Go set the table.”
“Prick city,” Brigitte says, hopping off the ladder when he’s out of earshot. “That machine isn’t going to work. I kicked it like three times. It’s a prehistoric war tank.”
She hands me a stack of metallic paper plates.
I look down and see my distorted reflection staring back at me.
“Just wait for the cake.” Brigitte sets a chest of decorations on the table. “The Mom had it shipped in from another state. It’s ridiculous. It costs more than my rent.”
She holds up the receipt.
Trying to set plates down on this tablecloth is futile. It’s bulging, like a pink wave crashing along the counter. The only way to get the plates to stay is to lay them vertical. I imagine the kids with their mouths open, tilting their heads from side to side, hanging their bodies over the chairs.
Fred is behind me again.
“Mrs. Fields is here. Best behaviour everyone. And don’t say anything, about anything, if you know what I mean.”
“No, what do you mean?” Brigitte purses her lips.
Fred waltzes to the front of the store, wearing his most ass-kissing grin.
“Did he say Fields?” I whisper as Brigitte lifts thick spools of tulle from the decoration chest.
“I try not to listen when he speaks.”
We busy ourselves stuffing gauzy fabric around the wall display.
The mother walks into the room.
“It’s Fields,” I say slowly, trying the name out in my head before doing so audibly. “Sasha Fields. Sasha Fields.”
“What’s wrong with you?” Brigitte turns and clucks her tongue. “I really can’t handle a nervous breakdown.”
My armpits are starting to sweat. “Brigitte, do you want kids?”
I’ve abandoned the display and am now wrapping bands of tulle around my wrists.
“Not now. Why, do you?”
I loop more gossamer fabric up my arms. “What about in the future?”
Fred waves at us like we’re friends.
“And here are my two star employees, Brigitte and Sadie. Brigitte is a veteran Wonder Conductor.”
“How nice.” Mrs. Field smiles, “Good to meet you Brigitte and Sad—oh—”
“Hi, Mrs. Fields.”
I turn so we are facing one another. The tulle continues to unspin. I imagine she isn’t Sasha’s mother, but the mother of the girl on the swings who didn’t die. What could it have felt like for that mother to come so close to losing her daughter and then to have her magically reappear? What would she have thought if she had known another little girl was hoping her daughter wouldn’t get up? Does she ever think of that swing set? There must be days she forgets.
Sasha’s mother grunts and I return to meet her eye. Maybe she knows what I wished for. I wonder what it is like for her, to stare at the mother of the baby who did die, the baby who didn’t make it long enough to have her own vicious thoughts on the playground. There wasn’t anything vicious about Katilyn, she wasn’t like me, or her father; she was gentle and curious.
I extend my hand. My arms have disappeared within layers of sparkly tulle. I look like I have butterfly wings. “It’s good to see you.”
“You too.” She seems to fumble for something to say, but nothing comes.
“Let me show you Music Alley.” Fred motions for her to follow.
It’s time for me to embellish the signs for her daughter’s ninth birthday.
“What was that?” Brigitte takes the spool from my hand and starts unravelling the fabric.
I stand completely still, except for my arm, which twists like a Barbie doll, only slightly, as Brigitte struggles to untangle me.
This must be what it felt like when my daughter tried to yank a party dress off her doll, but the plastic arms and legs resisted. She kept pulling, wanting to change the plaything’s outfit so the world could start all over again. She couldn’t understand why that simple want was so difficult to fulfill. What would she have thought of the big things?
She will never know them.
“Sadie.”
“I know her daughter.” The tulle is almost all unwound on one arm. “I knew her daughter.”
“You were friends with a little girl?”
“I had a little girl and they were friends.”
Brigitte works quick. My other arm reappears.
She spins the tulle backwards into the spool, as if she can put it all back together. The fabric bunches and refuses to return to its original form, but Brigitte sets it down like it is perfect.
“Come, let’s go make fun of the cake.”
Staring at the towering red velvet cake, I let myself think about my daughter. The cream cheese frosting is smoothed and indented in a precise pattern. When Katilyn and I baked, she always globbed on the store-bought icing before the cake cooled. It melted moments after her spatula made contact with the base. We’d watch as the sugary mixture dripped down onto the plate. This made me crazy, but it never bothered her. She was happiest when she knew she had made a thing happen.
This was one of the reasons she took the divorce so hard; she decided it had to be because of her.
Sasha’s name is written across the top of the cake in tight cursive. There are fondant polka dots accentuating her age. She and Katilyn became friends after learning they shared the same birthday. One of those commonalities that’s meaningless, but that we attach with so much weight. The two were inseparable in the months before her death. On that day, I didn’t even get to hug her. It was her dad’s day. Court-ordered shared custody. He was the one who left our daughter at the hockey party she never returned from. I didn’t get to see her. I didn’t get to feel the way her hair was either smoothed to her shoulder or tangled because she couldn’t understand the difference between a braid and a knot.
Her father and I started fucking again a few months after she was gone; always at his apartment, without speaking to each other, until all our clothes were off. It started when I realized I didn’t know what Katilyn was wearing the day she didn’t come home. Someone at the hospital lost the bag with her belongings. The last time I saw my daughter’s body she was wearing a white and blue hospital gown.
There were parts of her I’d already begun to lose when we divorced: the sound of her spoon tapping against the table when her father told a story that went on too long, half of her carefully curated outfits, a less than stellar math test, the new song she was learning in chorus. She had to talk to her dad on the phone, she left notebooks at his apartment, she only had time to tell me the beginnings of things; I’d only just learned about Sasha.
Now I needed to know everything.
The first time, he buzzed me up thinking I was his delivery. He told me grieving didn’t exempt me from common decency. He said he didn’t owe me anything. I pounded his chest with my fists. I hit hard, but shaky. He took hold of my shoulders and shoved me into the doorframe. I bit his lip until it bled, then I instructed him to undress me. It was fast, but I came moments before he twitched and released me.
When he settled into bed, I made a show of collecting my clothing and walked to the bathroom. Just as he began to snore, I turned on all the faucets. With the water rushing I tiptoed through the apartment to uncover pieces of her. It started with small things, like her pink travel toothbrush and a hard cover of Where the Sidewalk Ends that she’d taken out from the library. But I always looked for more.
The next morning, he told me we needed to stop, that it was complicating things, messing us both up. I lied and said being with him made me feel closer to her. He said he felt the same way and I placed my hand on his cock. The thought of using our daughter made it harder for me to come, but her father dug his thumb into my hip bone and in spite of myself, I moaned. Then I found the photograph. It was underneath a pillow in his guest room, like it was waiting for me to discover it, or as if Katilyn had left it there for us.
The photograph is from the day she stopped being our daughter. In it, she’s wearing knee pads. She looks like a ninja turtle. They cover half of her thighs in green camouflage and make her eyes look even brighter. She is eating a hot dog and Sasha is standing with a goofy smile right next to her.
I wonder what my daughter looks like now.
That was another thing about our divorce. When our child died, no one knew where to send cards, who to mail things to. Like the headband she’d left at a sleepover that appeared in my mailbox. What had her father received? What else did he know? I imagined all those parents with living children, cradling mugs of coffee on Sunday mornings, asking themselves: Who’s grieving more? Which one needs a phone call? I must have tried eleven mothers begging for someone to tell me about the party. But everyone swore they didn’t know anything. That picture was the missing piece. And her father had it that whole time. He must have gotten it from Mrs. Fields. She must have been holding onto it until she could muster the courage to dispose of Katilyn, just like everyone else did.
There is a time after someone dies when the world resets itself, even when that someone is a child. I know this. Lives continue to be lived. People forget things the way they always did.
After I found the picture, I almost stopped coming over. I’d gotten what I wanted, an image of my daughter the day I lost her; I swore to myself it was enough. But each time I said I wouldn’t be back, another item of hers appeared. I couldn’t help myself. I wanted more.
Last night, neither of us mentioned her birthday, but we were particularly rough. It hung in the air around us as I wrapped my knuckles around his bed frame and pretended his body was a stranger’s body throbbing against mine. He fucked me in the ass and groaned into my neck. When I was still wet between my thighs, he said he had an idea. I started wriggling into my jeans. I needed to get back before midnight. I didn’t want to hear.
“We could have another kid.”
I lowered my T-shirt over my head. I threw my hair into a knot. “It wouldn’t be her.”
I walked to the bathroom.
“I know, but still.”
When I left, I put her hairbrush in my purse. I’d been leaving it there as a favour to him. There were still some strands of her hair in it. Ever since she died, that brush had sat in his bathroom. The hot pink handle always hung over the sink, always waiting for Katilyn. I liked that both of us were pretending. She’d brought that brush with her everywhere. I was still in the process of teaching her how to do her own hair.
Growing up is a lot like not knowing the difference between a braid and a knot. My daughter won’t ever understand that. She won’t ever know what it’s like to wait patiently and to move her hair delicately from left to right. She doesn’t get to feel the latches in her mind, opening and closing, when she finally grasps a thing that seems so complex, but actually has only three simple steps.
She doesn’t get to do the one thing that only I, as her mother, could do. She doesn’t get to see what it looks like when she can do that thing better than I could.
The last time we were together, Katilyn woke up with a head full of knots. I spent all morning tugging her scalp with that pink hairbrush, as she sat at the breakfast table, shoving cinnamon toast crunch into her mouth. Each time I pulled too hard, she let out a squeak and spilled some of the milk. She kept apologizing and even though I swore I wasn’t mad, she didn’t believe me; the divorce had taught her to doubt.
At the hospital, Katilyn’s hair was tangled again. Her father liked it better that way. Before the nurses took her away, I brushed my fingers through her hair and wove it into a French braid. That is how my baby went down to the grave.
It’s time to celebrate Sasha’s birthday.
Children file into Toy Wonderland one after the other with sparkly headbands and athletic T-shirts. Some of them look familiar, but they’re all so much taller and gawkier than I remember. I can’t match their names to their faces. Except, of course, for the birthday girl.
“Come over here, Ana!” I hear one holler. “All of us are going to the bathroom.”
“Have you ever been here?” a whispered voice asks the boy behind him, “I heard it’s girly and they make the boys play with Barbies.”
“Well, I heard there’s a forest with animals and dragons and we get to shoot them.”
“We don’t get to shoot them.”
“Dragons aren’t even real, idiot.”
“Welcome. Welcome to Toy Wonderland!”
Sasha is seated on a purple princess chair with a thick velvet cushion. It is on top of what must be a cardboard box from our last shipment. I think Brigitte covered it with a satin blanket.
The children look up at Sasha. Fred scurries towards the entrance.
The nine-year-old is beaming.
“Welcome, my friends. It’s my birthday. Thank you for coming.”
She’s holding an index card with instructions and repeating the words dutifully. On cue, she waves her hand slow, like she’s royalty.
I think very hard about knocking her off the flimsy throne just to see if she’ll be able to get back up, but then a sea of mothers and fathers enters the room. They’re there to send their kids off for the afternoon and to enjoy mid-day treats of vodka and orange juice. Drinking before noon always feels better when you’re not alone, but rather surrounded, as I’m feeling now, by women who are trying to escape the dreariness of housewife-doom. What I wouldn’t give to crack their skulls open and to sit pouting in their big houses with their awful husbands just to be able to fight with their daughters about vegetables or curfews.
I miss the small things, really. Our nighttime rituals of Ritz crackers with cheese sprayed out of a can. Especially when her father’s patience thinned and we started seeing less of him. I suspected soon enough it would just be me, and Katilyn. “Just you and me and the world,” I’d say, then she’d open her mouth, still yellow from the cheese and correct me: “You and me and Daddy and the world.” She was too young to know we would be against it. Too young to know that just because we pinky-promised something didn’t mean it became permanent. She didn’t understand why Daddy was missing, but she was content with watching my fingers move across her hair while she memorized the steps.
“I fixed it!” Fred lifts me by my arms and starts to twirl me around the room. “I watched tutorials on YouTube and now it works.”
“What are you talking about?” I push him off me.
“The bear-stuffing machine. I used a screwdriver and everything.”
I give him a thumbs-up.
Fred collects himself, readying to scold me.
Brigitte steers me back to the children.
“Do you guys know how big Toy Wonderland is?” Brigitte interrupts. “There’s an entire forest where we can go exploring. That is, only if you aren’t scared.”
“I want to go,” one of them says.
“Yeah me, too.”
“Let’s go brave it.” Brigitte suggests and links arms with two of the children to shoo them away from the line. “Just stand and watch them,” she whispers as they hurry forward.
I survey the kids in the Barbie and Superhero Centre. There is a little boy with a crew cut that looks familiar. But I could just be imagining things.
“Hey, I know you.” The boy hops out of the line and pokes my knee.
My face flushes. “Oh—I don’t think so.”
“I think so.”
“I don’t.”
“Are you a mom?” He asks, leaning his head and jutting out his chin. “You look like a mom. But you work in a toy store.”
“In Toy Wonderland,” I correct. “This is not a store, it’s a world.”
“My dad says it’s a giant maze where they take all your money and make you sick.”
His dad is right.
“And my mom says there’s this crazy lady who works here who—” The boy stops.
“You think it’s me?” I smile for the first time genuinely. I crouch down to his eye-level. “Am I the crazy lady?”
He cranes his neck and studies me. He puts his hands on his hips and surveys my body. He takes a few steps back.
“Well?”
“Tommy, it’s your turn!” A voice from the front of the line calls out.
I raise my eyebrows.
He runs in the direction of the superhero banner.
I can’t take it anymore.
I head for the papier-mâché unicorn pasted on the back wall. Underneath it is the sound system. My fingers fumble underneath the sparkly material.
“If it’s your birthday, report to the super-secret headquarters.” My voice blares through the speakers.
I’ve been waiting all afternoon to be alone with that nine-year-old.
“If it’s your birthday report to the super-secret headquarters.”
I lower my Wonder Conductor cap below my eyes and walk through the Dining Chamber.
“Take a seat,” I say to Sasha when she prances into the room. I’m clutching a clipboard with a blank page attached to it. “This is very important and very dangerous.”
“Mrs. Rogers?” She squints at me.
“It’s Conductor Rogers.”
I didn’t change my name after the divorce. If I did, my daughter and I would have had one less thing in common. Now when I visit her grave, I get to feel like I belong there.
“What do I do, Conductor Rogers?”
“You see this big machine?” I motion towards the hunk of brass in the centre of the room. The glass top has finger smudges all over it, undoubtedly Fred’s attempts at being handy. “This is the most dangerous and important machine in the world. It’s what brings teddy bears to life. It’s what turns pieces of fabric into wild ferocious animals!”
“Do I get to make it go?”
“All by yourself.” I nod and pretend to mark something on the clipboard. “But I have to teach you first.”
I help Sasha onto the step stool under the handle that looks like a gas pump. She has a beautifully tangled expression of fear and awe. I hand her the furry cotton with the hole in the centre. It is the colour of chestnuts. After it is filled with fluff, it will become her very own birthday bear. We fasten it together to the mouth of the machine.
“When I tell you to, you are going to pull that lever, really hard. All the way down.”
I walk over to the end of the machine and press a few buttons to get it started.
“But what if I do it wrong?”
“I won’t let you.” I raise my hand up. “I promise.”
This seems to calm her. She seizes the handle with her little fingers and says, “Okay, I’m ready.”
“Now!” I shout.
She pushes the lever down with all her force and the machine begins to roar. It sounds like an antique train has woken up.
Sasha says something that is lost under the rumble of the stuffing machine.
“What?” I call over to her.
“—Katilyn—” is all I think I hear.
This is the first time in years I’ve heard a child say my daughter’s name.
“Did she ever make a teddy bear?” Sasha whispers, when I am next to her.
The sounds of the machine whirl around us, white cottony fluff starts sputtering out of the opening and into the soon-to-be-bear.
“No.” I swallow in air. “That was before Toy Wonderland.”
Sasha shuts her eyes. “Sometimes I miss her.”
I watch the bear’s belly extend.
She sits on the little kid ladder and clenches her eyelids tighter. I fiddle with my Wonder Conductor cap and watch the stuffing come faster and faster.
I close my eyes with her.
I want to ask why Katilyn wasn’t wearing a helmet. Why her entire body was covered in padding to protect her, but her delicate little head, with most likely very knotty hair, was completely vulnerable. I have hypothesized about this every day. Did she forget? Did someone take it? Were there not enough helmets? I have asked the supervisors at the skating rink. I have asked the mothers who facilitated the party. I have asked her father when we lay in his bed not looking at each other. No one will give me an answer.
“Mrs. Rogers.” Sasha’s voice is crackly.
The room is getting unbearably hot.
“Mrs. Rogers, the bear exploded!”
I open my eyes to see Sasha’s birthday bear burst at the seams. The fabric has overflowed with cotton and now the room is filling with hot stuffing.
She squeals, apparently delighted.
A sea of white fluff rises around us. It looks and feels exactly like how I always imagined clouds when I was young. The two of us could fling our bodies into it and the bear insides would cushion us. My daughter did not have that.
“Why wasn’t she wearing a helmet?” I scream over the wailing machine.
The door clamours open.
I see the outline of two figures, but their faces are lost to the steam and cotton. As they move closer, Fred’s flailing arms appear. He’s trying to clear a path through the stuffing for Sasha’s mother. She is clutching a camera in one hand, a champagne flute in the other. She starts to shriek. Trailing behind them is Brigitte and an army of children. Tipsy parents are stumbling in behind them.
“Her hair,” Sasha yells, before they can reach us. “Her hair. Katilyn was worried about her hair.”
Jenessa Abrams is a Norman Mailer Fiction Fellow. Her work has been supported by the MacDowell Colony, the Ucross Foundation, the Vermont Studio Center and Columbia University, where she earned her MFA in Fiction and Literary Translation. Her writing has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and published widely.
Oakland Galbraith is an eleven-year-old mixed-race artist from Vancouver, BC. His current work explores the idea of bringing the inside out. His pieces show how he perceives people, animals, and objects feel internally, even if they aren’t able to show it. Oakland’s art can be seen alongside eighteen other artists selected this year to cover City of Vancouver electrical boxes, and on Instagram @oakland.galbraith.