The baby sat up for the first time while I walked him through the office where I used to work. He was riding in my arms in a box that had once held paper. Multi-purpose, the paper had been. The office went through truckloads of the stuff.

The baby sat up and laughed. He was a baby of good humor. I didn't know his name. My mother would have known it, and I wished she had been there to see him sit. In my mind her voice told me that babies so young cannot hold up their own heads. This one could. The baby and I had a benign upholding conspiracy.

The baby lay down and sat up again. The people I had worked with had been reconfigured by way of their cubicles. No one recognized me. They were on their computers and phones, eyes focused elsewhere. Years had passed. I never would have visited without the baby.

He sat up as if exercising, knees bent, arms at his sides. His T-shirt's whiteness suggested industry. Three white snaps fastened at the shoulder.

I didn't know who his father was. His blond hair had me remembering an unformed, overconfident man with an overfed face, pursuing but not pursued. He'd called me Veronica, Virginia, Violet, Vidalia. I wasn't sure who the baby's mother was, either.

The baby had never been bathed. He might have cleaned himself, with his tongue, elegantly, like a cat or a rabbit. In the workplace, I'd passed a woman and a man each washing a baby in side-by-side utility tubs. I'd lost them. I looked for them again, for instruction, while also looking for the exit. Once when I still worked there, a man wandered in asking if there were warrants out for him, warrants he insisted he had cleared. We had nothing to do with warrants, though an executive secretary had been arrested, two days after she came back from maternity leave, for making meth. During her leave, her mother-in-law had died, and she'd described, when she returned, how at the end of the wake they'd tucked her in, cozy, and taken the jewelry from her fingers, wrists, and throat. Earrings—had she worn earrings? The executive secretary didn't say.

The unformed man had grown up in colonies where the limos were armored cars. His family's limo brought him to and from school. The heat was so great that despite air conditioning, the white people came out boiled.

The baby cracked jokes. Sitting or lying down, he couldn't see over the walls of the box, but he could see up: the fluorescents, the cameras, the spider plants and philodendrons, the promo stress balls and Lucite service awards, the open cabinets bulging with three-ring binders. He had dirt under his fingernails. Office work will do that to you, he said. Because of the fashions that year, the women's feet under their desks were bare, in blisters.

Jessica Roeder lives in Duluth. Her fiction has appeared recently in Threepenny Review and Kenyon Review.

Read her postcard.

Detail of collage on main page courtesy of Ubé.





W i g l e a f               10-28-18                                [home]