The Baby’s Name
by Bob Thurber
The screech sounds like some teenaged punk in a hotrod burning rubber, or a chainsaw whining as it knifes through hardwood. Arthur’s sleep shatters into a thousand fragments. He blinks at the darkness, pulls a breath, and resettles. A baby is crying. Whose baby? In a heartbeat he decides the commotion doesn’t concern him, and his mind presses toward sleep, filtering the noise, sorting its layers.
First is night sound, the silence beneath, the dense hush that forms the foundation, blending the whole clamor into one unsettling racket, like a group of incompetent musicians tuning their instruments.
This is not the layer that wakes him.
Second is the familiar raspy grate of his wife’s snores. The gush of air from mouth to lungs causes her throat to vibrate. It’s not her fault. She’s a frail woman with a delicate neck and a narrow airway. In deep sleep her breathing causes the floppy tissues to knock against the back of her throat.
This is not the sound that wakes him.
It’s the third layer that unsettles, making sleep hard to hold. The cry is that of an angry cat. A cat with its tail caught in a meat grinder. Someone is slowly but efficiently cranking, pulling the creature in, shredding flesh and fur.
No healthy baby should ever make a sound like that.
The feral shrieks jolt Arthur awake. He blinks again, turns onto his side, disentangles his legs from the top sheet. His brain merges the child’s cry into a dream—he’s riding a ferry across a choppy sea, holding to the rail at the rear of the ship, watching the baby’s crib being tugged by a heavy rope, while above her ten or twenty sea gulls glide on arched wings.
Are the birds dangerous? Arthur murmurs.
There are new rules to follow, a list of procedures. Baby dos-and-don’ts. Rule number one is Arthur must never pick up the child after midnight no matter how hard she cries. Otherwise, she’ll never learn.
The muscles in her lower intestines are undeveloped and slow to process. Gas builds up, cramping her with pain. His wife had it. His mother-in-law had it. It’s in the genes.
The baby shrieks, a long sustained alto.
Arthur calls her name from the railing of the ship and the wind pushes the sound back into his face. He worries about the sea gulls as the crib rises and falls, riding the white surf. Will they try to pick her up, peck at her flesh, pull away pieces like pink salmon?
The rope is taut, as thick as his arm.
His wife snores.
The baby’s name is not the one Arthur picked from the book of names. She has the name his wife and mother-in-law circled in red. It begins with the same letter of the name Arthur decided upon. Holding to the ship’s rail, twisting in restlessness, he tries to take comfort in that fact.
Guinevere is the name Arthur wanted. But his mother-in-law said it sounded too much like a black name.
A black name? How is Guinevere a black name, he asked his wife.
Gwen, his wife said. That’s what people will end up calling her. Gwen, she hissed. Which is definitely a black name.
His wife snores like a rhinoceros. In the dream she is beside Arthur on the boat, asleep in a deck chair.
Arthur lets go of the railing, jostles her shoulder which is slick with tanning lotion.
The baby, he says.
What baby, his wife says.
Our baby. She’s crying, says Arthur.
His wife tips back her floppy hat and glares at the sun, exposing the pale yellow flesh of her face and neck.
Listen, Arthur says. Can’t you hear her screams. She must be wet, or hungry, or both.
His wife watches the light lose some of its radiance as a cloud slides past.
No. You’re wrong, she says. You’re dreaming again. It's only the gulls you hear. Those filthy birds have been following us since the ship set sail.
She adjusts her hat and sinks low, hiding her eyes.
Now relax, and enjoy what’s left of our honeymoon. Unless you’d prefer to go back to our cabin and make a baby? Your call, she says.
Then the alarm rattles, another day begins, and Arthur sits up, his hands in his hair, his mind filled with the noise that has become his life.
And his daughter cries.
Bob Thurber is an old, unschooled writer living in Massachusetts. Though he rarely submits for publication, over the years his work has won numerous literary awards, and he has become widely recognized as a contemporary master of small fictions. Visit his website at BobThurber.net.