The Baby
- May 30, 2025
- 5 min read
by Amy DeBellis
I find her behind the church, tiny in the dirt, curled up like a seashell. I recognize her not with any of my senses but with something banging behind my breastbone, something that screams: That’s her that’s her that’s her!
So I scoop her up. I hold her in the palm of my hand, sunk deep into my pocket, all the way home: past the boarded-up storefronts, past the porch where Mrs. Calloway rocks in her dilapidated chair and spits her tobacco like a man into the yard. Past the high school where I can still remember the corrosive smell of the chemistry lab, the splinters from the cheap wooden chairs sliding into my thighs, the sweat pooling between my breasts whenever Michael caught my eye.
I take her out of my pocket when I get home. She’s warm and impossibly tiny, limbs crumbled with clumps of soil that appear for a moment like dark clots of blood.
She doesn’t look like a fetus. She doesn’t look like how she would have appeared at three months — the doctor didn’t let me see, though I begged; my mother was commanding him not to, her rough voice flaying the dark, laying it open — but I looked up pictures days later, hunched over the computer. My vision still a slurred red haze. My whole body feeling like a wishbone wrenched apart.
The baby in my palm looks like a perfectly formed newborn, only many times smaller: ears fully developed, hair tufty, limbs almost chubby. She’s asleep, little chest rising and falling, and I barely breathe. I’m afraid to do anything to wake her. But finally, when I go to bed, I put her in a teacup so I don’t crush her in the night. I want to fill it with dirt again, so she has something soft to lie on, but the act would feel too much like a burial. So I tear a scrap of fabric from my skirt and arrange it on the bottom of the cup, hoping it’ll be enough to keep out the chill of the cold porcelain.
Lying in my dark bedroom, the teacup inches away on my nightstand, I think I can hear her breathing. Maybe I’m imagining it.
I whisper a Psalm. “You who have made me see many troubles will revive me again.” My voice reminds me of the sound the wind makes as it passes through the weeds behind the church. “From the depths of the soil, you will bring me up again. You will restore me to greatness. You will comfort me again.”
And after the third again passes my lips, I know I can hear my daughter breathing. I smile, the heat of my heart breaking open, blooming in the darkness.
I sleep for a while, but then wake to the sound of the door opening and shutting: my mother coming home. Her bag — holding her platform heels, and lipstick, and crumpled fistfuls of tips — lets out a sound like a sigh as she lets it drop to the floor. She works late, but I never have to worry about my mother. My mother carries a gun.
If I had carried one myself, that grim spring evening with Michael, things could have been very different. My Please’s and No’s didn’t stop him but a gun would have, and I’d never have bled my daughter’s life away in a back bedroom. Never have felt any of that gutting, indescribable pain.
But then I never would have found her again.
The clock flashes its middle-of-the-night time at me: 4:04.
404. An error.
Around noon the next day, I realize my daughter hasn’t woken up. She’s still breathing, and I can make out the peaceful expression on her tiny face. She’s calm like an ocean without waves.
But who ever heard of an ocean without waves? Babies are meant to wake up, to wail. To burble and gurgle and coo.
I’ve never heard her voice. I can’t even imagine it.
“Wake up,” I whisper, and then I say it, and then I’m almost shouting. “Wake up! Wake up!”
But she won’t wake up. She continues to sleep, no matter where I put her: in the teacup, on my palm, cradled to my chest. If she were as she ought to be, she’d want to suckle right now, but she merely curls up against my sternum. Outside, the sky is striped with pink ribbons of cloud. Behind the mountains, the sun is going down.
Is she dreaming? I wonder. What does she dream of? I can’t come up with any answers other than the inside of my body, the pour of blood. But then I realize she might be dreaming of another place.
The tightness in my heart, my stomach: it feels like something sharpening in the dark, deep down inside of me.
That night I go out below the stars, crane my neck to stare up at their distant points of white fire. I kneel, and I do what I can no longer do in the stifling church, but only out under the stars or the clouds or the knifelike light of the sun: I pray.
But praying is pointless now. I already have my answer. God has given me what I didn’t get to have that night in July — the ripping pain inside me, the doctor’s bloodslimed hands, the sound of my mother screeching Don’t let her see it.
It, not her.
God has given me a chance to say goodbye.
The next morning, my daughter is as she always is: silent, motionless, unwaking. A calm, unnatural ocean.
With her in my pocket, I walk to the church, but I don’t stop where I found her. I keep walking, further and further into the field behind the building. In the distance there’s a fuzz of trees, but I’m not going that far. I’m only going to the stream, where the ground slopes down and turns wet and fertile, making me remember Moses in the bullrushes.
Why him? Why did that baby get to live, and not mine?
But it’s a thought without fire behind it, a thought I’ve had so many times by now that it’s merely going through the motions. A thought that has given up its right to occupy any real space in my mind.
I sit by the side of the stream. I take off my shoes, put my bare feet in the water. The stream is cool, and I think of the baptism my daughter will never get. I look at her tiny face one more time, count her breaths until I reach ten, and then I bury her in the tender soil near the water.
When I can speak again, I say a part from Isaiah. “All these others may forget, but I will not forget you. See, I have engraved you on the palms of my hands.”
I look down at the stream and its eternal, deathless movement. I watch the soil swirl gently around my ankles, linger for the space of a breath, and then slip away with the current.
Amy DeBellis is a writer from New York and the author of the novel ALL OUR TOMORROWS (CLASH Books). Her writing has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net, has appeared in the Wigleaf Top 50 Longlist, and can be found in X-R-A-Y, Uncharted, Write or Die, Monkeybicycle, Vol. 1 Brooklyn, and elsewhere.
