It was a tough decision to make, but when I got pregnant again, I knew I couldn’t handle a third kid. The thought of terminating the pregnancy was too much, so I looked into adoption. I didn’t want to ask anyone and give away my intentions, so I just researched it myself. I called a 1-800 number, and they put me in touch with an adoption agency.
I had to clean up before they came. Dishes had piled up in the sink, dirty clothes everywhere, toys all over the living room. Preston, my oldest, was crying from his pack-n’-play, but I had to ignore him. They would be there in an hour.
I thought of having someone call CPS on me, but that would have been so humiliating, more so than admitting I didn’t have what it took to raise another child. Still, I didn’t want those people to take one look at my apartment and haul all my kids off right there.
I started with the kitchen counters and cleaned out the fridge. In case they wanted to peek inside, I didn’t want any rotten food lying around. Then the living room. I piled up all the clothes in a hamper and stowed them in the closet. The toys I loaded into a cardboard box and sat next to the TV. It looked fairly livable. Now to just get Preston to stop crying and make us breakfast. I thought it would be best if the kids were eating when they showed up.
“Sorry, we’re in the middle of lunch,” I told them when they arrived, right on time.
“Oh, it’s no problem at all. What did they have for breakfast?” one of the social workers asked me.
“Oh, uh, I just made Preston some oatmeal. Rowan is still breastfeeding.”
“I see,” she said. “Do you mind if we take a look around?”
“Not at all,” I said, hoping they didn’t get too nosy. They looked around in the kitchen, peeked into my bedroom (which I didn’t have time to clean, but what can you do), though they didn’t say anything about the state of the apartment. They sat down on the couch.
“So, tell us why you’ve opted for adoption,” the other social worker said.
I gave them a sugar-coated rundown of how exhausted I felt, how I knew I couldn’t handle another kid, at least not right now.
“Well, we’d like to put together a family album, pictures of you and your children that we can send to prospective parents”
“But I’m only putting the newborn up for adoption,” I said.
“Of course, but we’ve found that prospective families respond much better when they can see the mother. We’d also like to take a short video, just of you, if you prefer, to show them as well.”
“Uh, sure, I have plenty of pictures on my phone. What should I say in the video?”
“Just say a little about yourself, as much as you’re comfortable with, maybe why you’ve opted for adoption, but it’s completely up to you.”
I went to the bathroom and fixed my hair as best I could, applied some last-minute makeup. I looked… okay, I guessed. I stared into their tablet and recited my story, why I chose to give up my child, though I didn’t word it quite like that. They seemed satisfied with my performance.
“We’ll be in touch with a list of prospective families. Thank you for your time, and thanks again for choosing Helping Hands adoption agency.” I saw them out and closed the door. Preston giggled and Rowan was fixated on his tiny little fists, which opened and closed, like a cat chasing its tail.
HIM
There was a party at my friend’s uncle’s house. Since I bought weed off his roommate, and smoked with them a few times, he invited me out. It was a house, a little ways out of the city, ‘out in the county,’ as we called it. I pulled into the gravel driveway and parked among the four or five other cars and made my way inside. I could hear sloppily played music coming from the garage. I let myself in and ‘the band’ stopped playing so everyone could greet me. They offered me a beer and we milled about, shouting over the music.
A little while into the party, this girl came downstairs. She wore a tight-fitting hoodie and jeans. She was ghostly pale, wore thick makeup, and had a gleaming, distressed look in her eyes, which met mine for an instant before she laid her head in her arms and apparently went to sleep.
“Who’s that?” I asked my friend.
“That’s Robbie’s girlfriend.”
Robbie, as anyone in that friend group would tell you, was by all rights a piece of shit. The first night I met him (at a bar, go figure) he was wearing a construction hat and proceeded to detail his recent statutory rape conviction, just to give you an idea of the guy.
“She’s cute,” I said.
“You should go for it,” he confided to me, “Robbie said she cheats on him all the time.”
The party ended, as all eventually do, with just a handful of us at the end of the night, tired and woozy, thinking of home. We mumbled over our lukewarm beers and bitter cigarettes. I got up to leave, steady enough, and bid everyone goodbye.
That night, Robbie’s girlfriend ended up hooking up with my friend, who I found out later was one of Robbie’s best friends. None of them seemed to care, since I never noticed anything different after word got out.
It was easy to find her on social media. We were both tagged in photos from the party, glassy-eyed and bloodshot pale under the fluorescent lights. I sent her a friend request and a quick message, saying I thought she seemed really cool, and asking if she wanted to talk more. She answered right away, and invited me over to her place, under the pretext of watching a movie. Her apartment was kind of a mess, and there was a spoiled milk smell in the air.
“Don’t worry, the kids are asleep. I’m gonna get a quick shower. Make yourself at home.” She went upstairs and I sat down on the couch, wondering what I would do if one of her kids woke up. I heard her singing in the shower. She was good, belting out soul song after soul song as they crackled from her phone’s cheap speaker. She must have been in there for fifteen minutes.
The water and the singing finally stopped. A few minutes later, she came back down and laid her legs across my lap, her hair drying in a towel.
“You wanna go upstairs?” she asked me. There was no fanfare. We fucked unceremoniously and fell asleep.
I awoke to a child wailing from downstairs.
“That’s just Preston,” she said, “I’ll get him up here shortly.” She wrapped her arms around me. “I had fun last night.”
“Me too,” I said, “But I have to get going. I have to be at work in an hour.”
“Oh shit, you should have set an alarm.”
“I did, I just didn’t adjust for the… detour.”
I shuffled into my clothes and kissed her goodbye. “I’ll call you,” I said, then made my way out of her apartment.
PRESTON
Mommy said we’re getting a new baby brother, but he won’t be staying (sad face). People are coming to talk to her, even though my brother is still in her tummy. She said he’s going to live with a new family, since ours was already too big, but it was just me and baby Rowan, what would be the harm in one more? Besides, we could sure use some help cleaning, since mommy definitely doesn’t like to do it. She’d been running around all morning while I cried to her from my pack-n’-play. If I was just a little bigger, I could have climbed out and tried to get some food from the kitchen. She finally got me out and cooked some lunch, even though we never had breakfast. The people came and talked to her for a while. They took a video of mommy for my brother’s new family. They left after a time, and we went back to our normal life.
HER
They sent me a list of families from all over the country, dozens of smiling couples, all vying for custody of my unborn son. I scanned the faces until I saw a couple, a young man and woman who lived in a nearby city, so it wouldn’t be much trouble for us to meet in person. Their contact info was right there on the list, so I rang them up. A woman answered.
“Hello?” she asked.
“Yes, is this the McMurtry residence?”
“It is, may I ask who’s calling?”
I told her my name, the due date of the baby. “They told me you’re looking to adopt?” I said. I could hear her breaking down on the other line. A man eventually picked up the phone.
“Who are you?” he asked, in wife defense mode.
“I’m sorry,” I said, “It’s just… I’m pregnant.”
He got her to calm down and they agreed to meet me at my apartment. Which means another round of cleaning, I thought.
When they arrived, they were punctual and well-dressed. They seemed young. I wondered which one of them couldn’t have children, and why I couldn’t have that problem. I offered them a seat on the couch and brought them some tea from the kitchen.
“Oh, thank you,” the woman said, but they never took a sip from their cups. “I understand you have two other children?”
“Yeah, they’re in their room.” For some reason, I didn’t want them to see my other kids, especially the wife, now that I’d met her, but I made sure the outfit I wore accentuated my swollen belly.
“Well,” she said, “We don’t want to keep you long. I’m sure you must get back to them. But if it’s alright with you, we’d like to go ahead with the adoption. We’ll stay in touch to make arrangements, of course.” I thanked them and showed them out. As soon as I heard their car door slam, I sank down against the door and sobbed. Preston started crying from the other room.
HIM
It was my birthday. I was on my way over to her place after work (no, I wasn’t the self-indulgent type to take my born day off work). She said she’d made me a cake, which was more effort than I’d ever seen from her before. I showed up and she looked a little tired. She let me in and immediately started apologizing. The cake had fallen and was splattered all over her kitchen floor.
“I got it out of the oven, put icing on it and everything, then the darn thing just jumped off the counter.”
“It’s fine,” I said, “Do you need help cleaning it up?”
“That would be awesome,” she said, “Sorry again, I’m so clumsy.”
We cleaned up the spilled cake, sweeping it into a dustpan and scooping the rest up with our hands, which were soon caked with icing and crumbs. We washed up and made our way upstairs.
It was just a feeling, but something seemed strange about the way she left the cake waiting for me on the floor. She couldn’t have cleaned it up, just a little? What were the odds that it fell just before I walked in? Maybe she was too lazy, I thought.
That night, while we were fucking, I thought I smelled latex, which was odd, since we never used a condom. I thought my pull-out game was strong. Being the weak man that I was, I finished (on her back, if you must know), let the after-sex calm subside, then confronted her about it.
“What, no,” she said, “It’s just this new shampoo I’ve been using.” She sprang up from the bed and fetched a bottle from the bathroom. “Here, smell it.”
I humored her and gave it a reluctant whiff.
“No, it’s different,” I said.
“That’s nasty, I would never fuck two people in the same day, gross.”
I couldn’t look her in the eyes, and while we weren’t explicitly exclusive, it still stung the old ego.
“Listen,” she said, “You have to go. Robbie’s coming over.” Robbie was the father of her second kid, if I never mentioned that before.
“Are you fucking kidding me?” I said, raising my voice. She shushed me.
“You’re going to wake up the kids, now go. He said he’s on his way.”
“I can’t fucking believe you,” I said, pulling on my clothes. I made my way wordlessly out of her apartment. She said nothing to stop me on the way out.
I woke up to dozens of texts from her, sent around three in the morning.
“I’m sorry I dropped your cake and kicked you out on your birthday. Robbie busted down my door and the cops took him to jail. I miss you. <3”
PRESTON
That one guy came over again today, but mommy threw his cake on the floor. I watched her do it with this mean look on her face. It was weird, because mommy had seen one of her other guy friends just a few hours before. He came in and I heard them clean up the cake, then they went upstairs, just like the man from earlier. A little while later, I heard them fighting, lots of f-words being thrown around by the guy. He left and a little while later, Rowan’s dad showed up. Too many visitors, I thought. Mommy locked the door and wouldn’t let him in, no matter how much he pounded. He seemed to have left, but when he came back, I heard power tools going off in the hallway. A few minutes later, the door burst in, and Rowan’s dad followed with it. The cops came and took Rowan’s dad to jail. I watched them stick him in the car through the window. Mommy cried and cried until I finally fell asleep.
HER
I handed my other two kids off to my mom. I couldn’t do it anymore, not if I wanted to be a singer. I met a guy online, a producer, he saw one of my videos I posted on YouTube (some stupid cover I did) and reached out to me. Apparently, he’d worked with some pretty big names, but he could have been bullshitting. He seemed legit enough to me. He said he had a home studio, and we could get started on tracking vocals right away. I took in the newfound silence of my apartment, then headed to his house.
It was a one-story home, painted a flat color I can’t remember. He met me at the door and welcomed me in. His house was sparsely furnished, few decorations, except for the odd knick-knack on his shelves, so I assumed he lived alone.
“So, where’s this studio?” I asked him. “I want to get started on something.”
“Oh, there’ll be plenty of time for that,” he said, pouring himself a drink. “Would you like one?”
“No, I’m good,” I said. The last thing I wanted was to be tipsy in that creep’s house.
“Come on, all the greats have at least a few before they go in the booth.”
“No, I’m fine,” I said, putting a bite in my voice.
“Look, bitch, I didn’t invite you into my home so you could give me attitude.” He came up to me, right in my face. His breath reeked of the cheap liquor he’d offered me. I panicked and went into seduction mode. If he did have a studio, it would be worth fucking him. I lowered my eyelids and caressed him.
“That’s more like it,” he said, as he unzipped his pants.
He didn’t have a studio, but he knew someone who did, a drummer friend of his. He gave me the address and told me to be there in a couple days.
This guy actually did have a studio, and we did record a little, but not a whole song or anything. Every take, the ‘producer’ kept telling me to take off another article of clothing. I could see them laughing at me from the little isolation booth, but I played along. By the time he’d punched me in for the third or fourth time, I was completely naked. I could tell what they wanted from the look in their eyes. I sauntered out of the isolation booth and melted into them like a vision of flesh and submission.
“Do you party?” the drummer asked me, producing a pipe that could only be for meth. We stayed up all night fucking and getting high. I asked them to send me the recordings of what we had worked on.
“Sure will,” the drummer said, and closed the door in my face.
HIM
It had been years since I’d heard from her. Granted, I’d kept up with her on social media (or internet stalked her, if you prefer, but haven’t we all at one point or another?). The odd Instagram post here, a cryptic status update there. But one day, I got a text from her. Not a DM, a text. She must have gotten my number from someone.
“I need to see you,” was all she said. I texted her back right away, since I thought she might be in trouble. She said she was five minutes away, which meant she must have either already been in the area, which was unlikely, or she made sure she was close before she reached out to me. Knowing her, it was probably the latter.
“Wow, you look defeated,” she said to me as I sat down in the passenger seat of her van. I guessed I was. Trash and junk were piled up in the back, and it looked as if she may have been sleeping in it. She was thinner than I’d ever seen her before. I hate to admit this, but she looked good.
“You wanna smoke?” she asked me. “Sorry about my van. Things have been pretty crazy lately.”
“It’s cool,” I said, “Sure, we can smoke.” She handed me a bowl already packed with weed. I took a hit, leaving half the green for her out of courtesy, and she let out a laugh she’d been trying to suppress.
“Sorry, there’s a little leftover meth in that bowl.”
“What?” I said, panicking. I’d never done meth before, nor did I want to start in her van.
“I’m just fucking with you. I wouldn’t do that.”
My heart started to flutter in my chest, but it could have just been the placebo effect.
“You wanna go to New York?” she asked me. “Come on, we could go tonight. I wanna try and make it.”
“As a singer, you mean?”
“Yeah, I met this slick producer guy, he let me record some stuff.”
“I know, I actually listened to it.” The recordings were years old by then, and she hadn’t posted much on her YouTube channel except for the odd acapella cover, filmed in her bathroom, for the reverb.
“You creep! How’d you find it?”
“You posted it on Facebook, silly.”
“Oh, right. What did you think?”
I thought the recordings were terrible, sound-quality wise, but her voice came through alright, even if it was nervous-sounding and shaky. That gave it a little bit of an edge.
“I liked it,” I said.
“Oh my god, thank you, getting that guy to record me was like pulling teeth.”
“Hey, so what happened to your radio?” I asked her. It looked as if it had been ripped out with little care for the casing. Maybe she sold it to fund her habits, I thought.
“Oh, that? I had to get rid of it. They kept trying to send me messages.”
“’They?’”
“Yeah, you know, the shadow men.”
“The… shadow men?”
“Yeah, but look, that’s not what I came here to tell you about.”
“Okay then, what is it?”
“You got me pregnant.”
“Um.”
“Don’t look surprised, we never used a condom. You’re the only guy it could have been.” I thought about the latex smell coming from her in her apartment, the surprise visit from her baby dad.
“But that was years ago,” I said, “What happened to the kid?”
“I gave him up for adoption. He lives one city over with this young wealthy couple. He’s in good hands.” Better hands than hers, I hoped.
“He. So we had a boy.”
“Yep.” She patted her legs as if this was just your everyday awkward silence.
SON
Dad, who wasn’t actually my real dad, said my real dad, my “bio dad,” since he was still my “real dad,” was going to come and visit. He said we would be going to a park and then get ice cream. I was already confused about which dad was who, but I agreed. Things had been pretty good up until then, not that they got much worse after or anything. We had a nice house tucked away in the country, which meant a big yard with plenty to explore, but also no friends to hang out with. Mom said I’d be home-schooled, but I could make friends other ways. I wondered when that would happen, since we never went anywhere. Mom said it wasn’t safe. I really tried to make sense of the whole “bio dad” situation, but it made my brain hurt. In the end, I saw it as a chance to finally make a new friend.
HER
Things got bad after I went to the drummer’s house. I got strung out, hard. I moved in soon after and became nothing more than a glorified spinner, a name I only really lived up to once I lost a bunch of weight. I was always a little heavy, but the meth and pills cleared that right up. I felt weak and jumpy most of the time.
Somebody flattened a tire on my van. Something told me it was either the ‘producer’ or the drummer, to keep me there. I waited for the drummer to pass out and cleaned out his wallet. I used the cash to buy a new tire, changed it with some help from this older guy who was sitting out on his porch, and made it back to my apartment. A pink sheet of paper was taped to the door, an eviction notice.
“Shit,” I said to myself, ready to crumble. I snatched the paper off the door and collapsed down to the floor of the hallway, sobbing. A young woman about my age popped her head out of her door, opened just a crack, and asked if I was okay.
“Fuck you,” I hissed, throwing the crumpled-up eviction notice at her. She ducked back inside and fastened the dead bolt. Best to get gone before she calls the cops, I thought.
I did the only thing I could think to do. I called my mom. No answer. I called again, hoping I had enough gas to make it to her house. She finally answered. She sounded fucked up, as usual.
“Mm, hello?” she said, as if she just woke up.
“Mom, it’s me, your daughter? Why didn’t you pick up?”
“Sorry, I was passed—uh, I was sleeping.”
“Where are the boys?”
“Oh, I’m sure they’re around here somewhere.” Imagine that being the babysitter’s response when you called to check in.
“Mom, what the fuck?” She hung up on me. I tried to suppress my rage as I sped to her place. Let them pull me over, I thought, I’ll steal their damn cop car.
I should’ve known she would fuck up our agreement, but I needed time away. Being a single mom was exhausting, and I thought if I had just a couple months to get a music career going, I could scoop them back up with my armloads of money, but I didn’t make it that far. Yet, I assured myself.
The door was unlocked when I got there. My uncle was snoring on the couch, and I could hear my mom’s chunky-sounding coughs. I kicked my uncle’s leg.
“Where are the boys?” Snores were his only response. I called for them.
“Here, mommy,” Preston said from their temporary bedroom. They had colored all over the walls with pens and crayons. Preston was covering Rowan’s face with lipstick he had found somewhere. They were little hellions, but they were still my boys. They rushed over to me, and I knelt to meet their hugs.
“Where did you go, mommy?” Preston asked me. I just cried and held them, wondering where we were going to live.
HIM
I wore my best clothes. If my son was going to see me, he was going to see me looking my best. No cowlicks and hole-ridden jeans today, he was getting the job interview version of his old man. The drive was a little over an hour. You’d think it would have given me plenty of time to meditate and compose myself, but it seemed like I so much as blinked, and I was there. At least I wasn’t over-thinking it, but where did the time go?
They had a beautiful house, far enough away from the road that you probably couldn’t even hear the cars going by. They were there to greet me at the door. It swung open before I could even knock or ring the bell.
“I understand you’re the bio dad?” the man asked me.
“Yes, like I said over the phone, I didn’t know I was the father until very recently. Otherwise, I would have come much sooner.”
“Of course, please come in,” he said. We shook hands, and his wife wrapped me up in a big grateful hug. I looked at his eyes and kept my hands away, to show him there was no funny business.
“Well, he’s upstairs if you want to meet him,” the man said.
I rounded the stairs, trying to be quiet so I could retain some element of surprise. I cracked his bedroom door, and get this, he was reading a book. My son, reading. I couldn’t believe it.
“Hey, little guy,” I said to him from his doorway.
“Hello,” he said, without looking up from his book. It was Pete the Cat, the one where he raced a turtle, I guessed, since I didn’t see any more pages before he closed the book and rose to face me. We both studied each other’s features, looking for similarities. I guessed his nose was sort of shaped like mine.
“Whatcha readin’?” I asked him.
“Pete the Cat. It’s stupid.”
“Why do you say that?”
“They’re always trying to teach you a lesson in these books. By the time you get to the end, you know Pete’s going to win the race. Just once, I want Pete to lose. Then we’ll see how they like it.”
I thought that whatever home-schooling techniques they were using were working. My son was critically analyzing a book well within his age range. Smart kid, I thought, nothing like his father, or his mother, for that matter.
“Well, hey, I thought we’d go to the park, maybe feed some ducks. That sound fun?”
“You shouldn’t feed ducks bread, you know, it’s bad for them.” Well, there goes that plan, I thought, seeing many sandwiches in my future, so the loaves of bread I bought didn’t go to waste.
We loaded up in their van and headed to the park. On the way, my kid watched a nature documentary with headphones, displayed on a screen built into the passenger seat. I watched along with him, without the added benefit of the no doubt erudite and English-accented narration, thinking I might be able to quiz him about it later.
The park was centered on a sizable duck pond. There was a shelter area with bathrooms, a playground, and benches scattered along the edge of the water. We got out and settled at a nearby bench.
“We’ll leave you two alone for a while,” the husband said, as he and his wife held hands while they traipsed dreamily along the pond’s edge. A long silence passed between myself and the boy.
“What are you thinking about?” I asked him.
“Mm, nothin’.”
“What did you think of those penguins? Pretty cool, huh?” I said, referencing the nature documentary.
“I guess,” he said. I picked up a rock and skipped it across the water.
“Hey, asshole, I’m trying to fish here,” a man yelled from across the pond. The boy laughed and tried to skip his own rock, but it just plunked into the water.
“You better get your fuckin’ kid. He’s scaring away the bluegill,” the fisherman shouted. I waved the man off and we started in the direction of his guardians.
“It’s okay if you don’t want to talk,” I said. “I’m cool with that.” He reached up and held my hand. We met up with the couple, who sat on a bench just around a curve in the pond.
“Ice cream, anyone?” the wife asked.
SON
I met my bio dad today. It was pretty cool, I guess. He kept asking me questions, but mom said he was just “trying to relate.” I have to admit, it felt cool when I held his hand, like I was touching my real flesh and blood, I guess since I was born. We went and got ice cream after the park, but I wasn’t really hungry. My bio dad ate all of his really fast, which I thought was funny. I actually wouldn’t mind if he visited again. Maybe we could watch another nature documentary, since he seemed to like those. I couldn’t wait to tell my parents about it when he left. As always, they were very patient with me as I sputtered my way through another story. I asked them if I could see him again, and they said, “we’ll see,” which I think was their way of saying they didn’t know. They didn’t know, or they wouldn’t tell me, one or the other. I wondered if I would meet my bio mom one day, too.
HER
I finally managed to settle down after a while. I did some door-dashing, and between that and the assistance I was getting, I made ends meet. Rowan’s dad started helping me out (court-ordered, mind you) but it was a welcomed relief. I would drop Preston off at my mom’s and scramble around for a handful of hours, making as much money as I could.
We moved back into my old complex, different unit, same floor plan, so it was almost as if we hadn’t moved at all. For all they knew, we just took an extended vacation at grandma’s.
I decided to reach out to my adopted kid’s dad and see how he was doing. We met at this place he likes to hike at. Part of it was this old cemetery from like the 1800’s or something. He seemed really tired. We stopped to rest at the top of these wooden stairs that led down into some marshlands. I could tell from his body language that he wanted to fuck, but that wasn’t what I had come to do (for once). Not that I wasn’t into the risky public thing, it just wasn’t the right time.
“So look,” I said, “I wanted to tell you this in person.” He shuffled a little bit, stood up, and lit a cigarette. “You’re not the dad. I’m sorry.”
He stared off into the distance. I could tell he didn’t want to be looked at.
“I figured as much,” he said, trying to cover the tracks of his own heart. “But it was still fun to meet the little guy.”
“Why did you wait so long after I told you to set up a meeting?”
“Listen, you lied to be about something extremely serious and personal, don’t chide me for being a deadbeat dad. I saw your apartment back in the day, you might not have even been able to keep him.”
“Yeah, it was pretty bad,” I said. “I’ve been thinking about us. I’ve changed. I’m honest now.”
“You want me to take you back, after what you just told me?”
“I told you, I started telling the truth. No more lies, no more bullshit.”
We were together for a few months before he found out I cheated on him.
HIM
It was foolish of me to get with her in the first place, let alone take her back, but that was the last straw. I had two or three people messaging me, saying they’d seen her with other guys. One of them even sent me screenshot sexts that fit inside the timeline of our attempted rekindling. Of course, when I confronted her, she denied it. I showed her the screenshots, and she said her account had been hacked.
“They hacked your nudes, too?” I asked her, with as much sarcasm as I could muster, scrolling through the damning evidence. She broke down, but I didn’t let it soften my reserve.
“It’s over,” I said, “I can’t do this anymore.”
SON
I still keep up with my bio parents as much as I can, but my foster parents won’t let me talk to them without supervision. My bio mom says some pretty crazy stuff sometimes, so I couldn’t really blame them. I wondered if I would become all manic and frantic like her one day. My bio dad was a lot more chill, but I never saw him again after his first and only visit. Even so, he wished me happy birthday every year, sent me gifts then and on holidays. It was nice to have at least a pen pal, considering how sheltered I was. A part of me thought that one day, the world was going to slap me across the face, that all the stuff around me was just a bubble protecting me from inevitable doom. When I voiced my concerns, my foster parents assured me that there were children in the world, some even close by, who had a very hard life, and I should be grateful. I was sick of grown-ups telling me to be grateful all the time, like it’s freakin’ Thanksgiving year ‘round or something. I guessed I did have it pretty good. Everything was going smoothly until my bio mom came to visit. She crashed her van right into the mailbox and rushed the house. I could hear her pounding on the door and screaming, “Give me my son, give me my son.” I didn’t know what to do, so I just hid in my closet. Eventually, the police came and took her away. She looked very, very tired.
THE COUPLE
We couldn’t express to you the gift this child has been to my husband and I. Where our marriage was once dull and full of dread, this boy has brought a sparkle back into our lives. He is excelling in academics, as I’m sure he’s told you (yes, we supervised all the texting and video chats, I’m sure you understand) and he is growing into a bright young man. I’m sorry to hear that you are not actually the biological father, but we thought it best not to inform our son (god, it feels great to say that!) until we know for sure. Until then, I understand if you would no longer like to continue your visits, as I’m sure this has all been very painful for you.
A part of me expected her to show up, but I didn’t think it would actually happen, and in such an explosive way. Luckily, our insurance covered the damages, but I can’t imagine how our little one must have felt seeing her like that. He talks about it, and you, often, but we just do our best to change the subject. I hope her stint in jail was without mishap, but I’m sure you understand why we’ve ceased contact. I hope this letter finds you well.
Sincerely,
Miranda//
About the Author
G. W. McClary is a native of Ohio, with a B.A. in literature. His stories have appeared in Pulp Lit Mag, The Fear of Monkeys, Mobius Blvd, and the 2024 Visions anthology [Pages Promotions], and are forthcoming in Mystic Mind, Schlock! webzine, Nova Literary-Arts Magazine, Altered Worlds: An Altered Reality Anthology, CC&D [Scars Publications], and Dark Horses.
You can find G.W.’s works on Amazon: Visions: Stories and Poems from Peculiar Perspectives: 9781628283266: HERE
Mobius Blvd: Stories from the Byway Between Reality and Dream No. 16: February 2025: HERE
Books, Timada’s Diary, Mystic Mind, Mobius Blvd, and Schlock! webzine. HERE
Did you enjoy this story, and others? Please use the like button so that others will know how you felt about the story.
About the Author
