Lizards: Short Story Read Online Free Page B

hostess. He is so tall that Emma can’t reach Nicky’s bonnet, which is slowly slipping off her head.
    “What?” Ed says, half turning at the feel of Emma’s hand on his shoulder.
    “It doesn’t matter,” Emma says.
    Ed suddenly yells something and stumbles.
    Nicky flies from his shoulders.
    Emma is splashed in the face. Half-blinded she turns. Nicky is on the floor, next to the wall.
    “Get away!” she screams, punching at Ed. He falls on his knees and lifts Nicky’s head, which is drooped too far sideways. His black hands lift Nicky’s head. Now Emma sees the gash at the side of Nicky’s neck. Blood pours out. Bright red baby blood. Emma presses her hand over the gash, the blood streams through her fingers. “Stop this!” she screams. Nicky’s eyes flutter.
    “We have to stanch it,” Ed says. His voice is low and sensible. Emma tears at her own skirt. Her baby’s head is falling off, but it’s a matter of stanching the blood. She gives Ed her skirt and he quickly rips it and binds Nicky’s neck. Nicky’s legs jerk.Ed says it was the ceiling fan. Emma glances up—a silver blade, still spinning.
    When Nicky was born, Emma’s father stood at the window of the hospital nursery and loudly compared his caesarean-section granddaughter to the brown, trammelled-looking birth-canal babies. Nicky was a plum among prunes, he said. Nicky was a Christmas doll among hernias.
    “We are all hernias, more or less,” Emma’s mother said in her sardonic way, which had a mollifying effect on the annoyed-looking relatives of the other babies.
    Once Emma and Nicky were back at home, he often dropped by in the afternoons, sometimes with Emma’s mother, usually not. If Emma had a cat to groom, he minded Nicky. He made tea for Emma’s clients and sold them life insurance. One day he answered the door and it was the red-haired guy.
    “Is that maniac your husband?” the guy asked Emma.
    “I thought you’d moved,” she said quietly. Her father had gone back to playing with Nicky.
    “I was in the neighbourhood,” he said. “So,” he said, “I guess you’re not up for any action.”
    She smiled. “No.”
    “Some other time,” he said.
    She started shutting the door. “I don’t think so,” she said.
    It wasn’t guilt, it wasn’t tiredness, it wasn’t worry that her father was listening. It was no interest. Since Nicky’s birth she’d had zero sex drive. Which was natural, so her baby book said. Natural and temporary. “It’ll come back,” she told Gerry.
    “Sure it will,” Gerry said enthusiastically, although he didn’t seem very disappointed that it was gone. Like Emma, he was all wrapped up in Nicky. They lay her on a blanket on the floor and knelt over her and kissed and nibbled at her like two dogs feeding from the same bowl.
    Nicky preferred the floor to her crib. If they put her on the floor and patted her bottom, she stopped crying. Emma’s father had discovered this. He was constantly trying things out on her to test her reactions and to nurture her perceptions. He carried her around the apartment and touched her hand to the walls and curtains and windows. He opened jars for her to smell. He warbled songs in what he claimed was Ojibwa, holding her foot to his throat so that she might pick up the vibration. One of the songs was apparently about how the toes of a baby’s feet are like pebbles. After Nicky died, Emma couldn’t stop thinking of her toes like pebbles. She raved that she wanted Nicky’s foot, she should have kept her foot and stuffed it, and then she would at least have her foot.
    “I don’t know why I didn’t think of something along those lines,” her father said. “A couple of months ago I read about a taxidermist in Yugoslavia who preserved his deceased son and claimed it was a great comfort.”
    He was stretched out beside her on her bed. Emma spent all day in bed, and her father and mother arrived at noon with lunch and Audubon field guides and photography magazines