Bad Things

When we created her, I feared that the Bad Things, through the enmeshment of our bodies, might escape the tendrils of my dejected DNA and find their way into her tender, precious embryo. But at the time, my husband had been so enthusiastic about the prospect of her existence, so swallowed up by the ecstasy of the act itself, that I found myself unable to voice a protest otherwise. “You can’t overthink it, Bea. Besides, aren’t you excited to see how they turn out?” He’d grin from ear to ear, gesturing to an abdominal entity that wasn’t quite there yet.

Eager family members would grapple to pull me aside at holiday gatherings and chide me for falling behind the eight ball. I’d slink apprehensively through the corridors of my over-crowded childhood home, stuffed to the rafters with cousins and uncles and newborns who would be thrust into my unwilling arms, their chittering mothers placing bets on whose dribbling pride and joy would convince me to reproduce first. I’d duck off into the guest bathroom, full of turkey and dread, and pop a couple of TUMS to banish the anxious roiling in my gut.

There I was in the mirror, a frayed wire on the cusp of an outage, holiday makeup dissolving into a glittery smear. He would always come to find me there, wipe my tears, take me by the arm, and tenderly lead me back into the dizzying fray. Back towards the disappointed glares I’d receive when accepting a glass of Pinot Noir from an alcoholic aunt, quashing any fantasies about my gestation. The sight of us together would naturally attract an audience. Squabbling cranberry sauce smiles. “We’re hoping by the end of next year,” he’d announce with a peck on my cheek, warding off further interrogation. “You know how Bea is. She gets nervous about these things. But I keep telling her that once it happens, she’ll feel different. Her instincts will kick in, and it’ll be as natural to her as breathing.”

Back then, I supposed that he could be right. Human beings have procreated for countless centuries, and for the most part, we’ve turned out okay. Brad certainly did, all goofy grins and startled laughter that sounds like its been filtered through a woodchipper. In the game of averages, I reasoned that a happy, carefree person such as himself, and me, frazzled and neurotic as I am, could merge to produce a decently content person at the very least. Specifically, I felt that Brad’s far superior qualities would shine through and offset the possible infiltration of the Bad Things. But concurrently, I felt this was a fragile line to walk, and easily, I could peer over the edge and see myself tumbling, stomach full of doom, past the point of salvation. It was a premonition that left me restless, panicked, overwhelmed, gargling dread, counting down the months, days, hours, until my time was up and I’d incubate something that could have all the chances in the world or no chance at all.

The prevailing belief in my family was that worry and sadness were failings of character. Side-effects of the laziness afforded to my generation by technology and the conveniences it created, the world swelling at our fingertips. I was a product of blue-collar laborers: grandparents and great-grandparents who worked in delis and factories during their adolescence. Parents who delivered newspapers by bicycle, funded their own education, suffered repetitious layoffs, and had to scrap together enough funds to ward off impending homelessness. These were the stories that circulated our dinner table, outlined my childhood discipline, and hung over my head as a reminder of all we had to lose at all times.

I felt on some visceral level that I was disappointing my predecessors with my inability to take it on the chin. A vast divide hung between who our family was represented by in the past and who they’re represented by now – a maladjusted adult with nothing to show for herself but a handful of rampant phobias: germs, elevators, odd numbers, crowds, tea served too hot. Some kind of mutation in our bloodline – Bad Things. My grandmother used to drag me to our local church, plop me into a rickety pew, and tell me to pray until whatever demon that had hold of my faculties was exorcised. She’d chalked it up to indulgence, blamed my parents for not having given me enough real things to cry about, sprinkled me with holy water, and hoped I wouldn’t burn.

Every unassuming gesture made by the world around me felt like an unpredictable threat, and those threats morphed into unsavory thoughts about my uselessness in extinguishing them. I’d wake up in a cold sweat, choking on my lungs, wrecked by an invisible, fearsome beast. I found myself seated across from a sterile woman with a fake smile who gave official designations to my ailments. Somehow, that didn’t make me feel better. I was riddled with labels like a hazardous science experiment doomed to explode. WARNING: This person may contain Bad Things.

Brad, on the other hand, so effortlessly exists that sometimes it pains me to occupy a place within his radiance. A staunch risk-taker and golden retriever in the flesh, I’d bumped into him at the pharmacy while trying to purchase a jumbo bottle of heartburn pills and the rest is history. In hindsight, despite our differences, I thought that someone as outgoing and ceaselessly energetic as Brad might infect me with some of his charisma. At least, that was the consensus among my family, who welcomed him with over-eager arms and shipped me off to the altar without a moment’s hesitation.

Marriage is full of unknowns, and naturally, I’d been scared to death – heartbreak and divorce papers and expenses looming at the back of my mind. But somehow, we managed a relatively normal life. We rescued two mutts from a local shelter and spent our weekends making repairs to our shabby 1970 fixer-upper that other homebuyers our age feared touching with a ten-foot pole. Where I saw disaster, Brad saw an opportunity. When I was certain we’d go bankrupt and consequently become homeless, Brad assured me that we could weather any storm. My husband handled all my faults with such nonchalance that I thought he must have a fetish for disarray.

It's that comforting nature of his, and dedication to pushing the envelope for the sake of expanding my horizons, that somehow bewitched me into reluctantly agreeing to swap DNA and amalgamate a separate entity that would eat away at my insides for nine months. I’m still not entirely sure what made me say yes. Was it his charm? Some primal instinct I’d been told I should have? Family members who expectantly hungered for a new soul to dote on? I’m not sure we’d ever truly discussed the matter beyond Brad’s begging and wistful anecdotes. It seemed to me more like a resignation of sorts.

Every night for months, I’d climb the stairs where he’d be waiting, naked and giddy like a child on Christmas Day, there to unwrap me and feast on my flesh. “Think about it, Bea. We’ll be the best parents!” He’d say to me every chance he got. We’d go shopping and he’d skip over to the baby aisle, pointing at pastel onesies and bibs with cartoon animal faces printed on the front. They seemed so sad to me. I’d feel a kindling behind my eyes, a pull in my chest with no proper cause. “We should buy some of these.” He’d say, putting them in our cart alongside my Nyquil and heartburn tablets.

“Why?” I’d ask, feigning innocence to protect the hurricane of discomfort stirring in my body. He’d whisk the cart away from me and lead us to the cash register before I could protest. I looked up from our pile of odds and ends rolling down the conveyor belt to lock eyes with a magazine stand – tabloids boasting about greedy billionaires and humanitarian disasters and polar bears running out of ice.

Brad snaked his arm around me and planted a kiss on my temple. “Because we’re gonna need them someday.” He said, as though this was obvious, already written in stone. I watched the grocery store shrink behind us from the passenger’s seat of his Ford pickup, feeling every bump in the road as though I were being punched with tiny needles, my body wringing itself out the whole way home.

That was the thing about Brad. He was so endearing that sometimes I didn’t realize I was agreeing to something until I was already in it. On our first anniversary, he’d urged me to be more adventurous, and that sentiment seemed innocent enough until, before I could blink, we were ziplining through a canyon, an event that put the kibosh on our dinner plans. My parents loved Brad because he was, in their words, “free-spirited”, a quality that they often spoke of with awe. He pushed the restrictive walls of my comfort zone and gave them hope that I was not completely lost, which is to say, around him, I wasn’t entirely myself. I’d learned that this was not necessarily a negative thing. In many ways, I think I am just Bad Things occupying a hollow, fleshy shell.

Undressed at night in his arms, I’d stiffly listen to the blood thumping in my ears and hold ceremony for my unease, my brain cruelly replaying our time together, churning up ceaseless worries about the troubled soul we may conjure in the act. I don’t much believe in gods because they’ve always failed to answer me in the past, but in the space between us, I wedged one of my grandmother’s prayers and begged to be made of malfunctioning parts. I’d only sometimes swallow my guilt when he’d roll over and face me with something close to unbridled joy. At other times, I felt I could hate him. I’d think about the pile of untouched baby clothes in our walk-in closet and swallow the lump growing in my throat. Does he have any idea at all? I could only hope that a little body full of Brad’s goodness could fill them out.

He loved me, of course he did. But increasingly, as the months went on, I thought he more so loved the potential festering in my organs. I found myself slowly becoming disgusted by him and his crooked grin and his naked body and how it might disease me with a potentially doomed offspring. Any time I’d retreat to the bathroom, fumbling for my medication, taking a scalding shower, collapsing in on myself to sob in the nook between the toilet and the vanity, there he was, embracing me, telling me to take deep breaths, then thrusting a box of pregnancy tests into my arms with a look of anticipation.

I thought about my mother a lot those days. And her mother. And her mother’s mother. How did they feel such excitement in the face of something so grotesque and terrifying? Did they not perceive the infinite dangers attached to incubating another human being? The metamorphosis of your body, the blood, the poking and prodding, the discomfort, the pain, the very likely possibility of demise. How does someone summon the type of courage required to reproduce without the perception of inevitable doom? Millions of women on the planet, past and present, and somehow, I felt I was the only one whom jubilation evaded when it came to maternity. Brad would send me links to mommy blogs, and the stock images of blonde supermodel influencers cradling their cheesing children filled me with shame. Such a blessing, they’d tout. It gave them purpose. The best thing they’d ever done. Reading their testimonies to motherhood made me increasingly paranoid. The Bad Things were infecting my head, my stomach, my husband, festering in the crook of my neck, my tear ducts, my nostrils. I became more and more aware of the impending damnation lingering over my shoulder.

Tick-tock, when was your last period?

…

“You’re going to be such a good mother. You’re so careful about things, you know?” Brad said to me five months later while painting our spare bedroom a dusty rose color. Something about the uneven strokes of wet paint made me nauseous. My face was always scrunched up like a crumpled tissue at all hours of the day. My coworkers took to calling it “Resting Bea-face”. The Bad Things began to outwardly manifest – tremors in my hands, pain in my lungs, vertigo with every step – further irritated by the growing lump in my center.

“It’s all normal.” A doctor said to me while slathering my abdomen in ultrasound gel, a fire of pins and needles breaking out across the taut surface. I frantically turned to Brad while my knuckles shifted cold and white in his grasp. But he wasn’t looking at me. He was watching the convoluted, monochrome monitor, lips parted in awe as he watched his beloved parasite somersault, irritating my bladder with every tumble. I hadn’t eaten anything of substance for months, unsure if the worsening nausea was symptomatic of my condition or the debilitating horror that grew as she did. I’d double over in the middle of our living room, gasping desperately for air I couldn’t get because she had relocated my organs on account of her size, greedily consuming this space that used to be mine. Brad would help steady me as I tottered on weak legs, saying, “Pretty soon we’ll be a family. Aren’t you excited?” His words sounded like sandpaper to me.

I’d lie awake every night, feeling my heart lurch in time with her alien squirming. Sometimes it became so overwhelming that I’d stand in the kitchen at 3 a.m. and stare at the knife block, fantasizing about a self-facilitated C-section. Brad would always come to swiftly retrieve me while I sobbed inconsolably about my bloated, aching body. “So hormonal today.” He’d chide, as if this were all just collateral damage. “You need to rest. Stress isn’t good for the baby.” Though he grabbed me a glass of water and tucked me into bed and planted a kiss on my forehead, I had never felt more invisible. The being inside of me was consuming every ounce of my existence until I felt I had been reduced to the potential of new DNA.

I’d lie swollen and paralyzed on the couch, counting down the days until her inevitably excruciating arrival, mind churning up unproductive anxieties. Death, death, death. Blood. Spinal taps. Contractions. I grappled for internal peace by clinging to the wavering assurance that Brad’s goodness would win out in the end, and it would all be okay. Our daughter would not be full of Bad Things.

…

I screamed like a banshee, my throat gone raw, splayed open on a hospital bed, heart rate plummeting as I gushed blood from the newly gaping abyss between my legs. They handed her off to me, wrinkled and red-faced, but I felt nothing that other women – at work, or on the mommy blogs, or in passing – told me I was supposed to feel. When she wriggled in my arms, my body still throbbing, I was filled with despondency. Nothing was the same, and I was repulsed by her. The idea of being bound to this new person for life, her entire well-being reliant on me alone, no going back – the gravity of this shift – sent me reeling over the edge. My lifelong inability to cope with change surged through my veins like a venom. I was hyper-aware that every choice I made from this point forward would have a permanent consequence on the life of an unsullied innocent, and it sent me into a ceaseless tailspin. I was viscerally disturbed. I thought to myself, as the nurses took her away to clean the congealed fluids from her body, that we’d have been better off if she’d never been born at all. You don’t have to worry about protecting someone from the world if they don’t exist to be preyed upon.

I smiled weakly for pictures when family and friends came to coo at her, but after that, I could never really look her in the face. I felt like I was wearing a Halloween mask when I’d try to force a doting smile. It made me want to gag. I’d hand her off to Brad at every opportunity. He would kiss her all over and excitedly point at every tiny part of her. “Look! She has my eyes! And my nose! Bea, look! Doesn’t she look a bit like your mom? She has her dimples!”

Brad found fatherhood delightful and pleasant because donating one’s sperm and smiling at it all day is an easy thing to do, I imagine. I woke up at all hours, my breasts ached, and my head spun. I fed and planned and cleaned up and carried her around like an unwelcome dead weight, and yet no matter what I did, she continued to cry, never content. She didn’t giggle or smile like those babies in the diaper commercials, her vacuous mouth always open wide in perpetual irritation. There was a lurking thought there whenever I watched her scream – a symptom of genetic failure. Bad Things. I’d dismiss it by locking myself in a closet, plugging my ears, and following her lead.

When Brad took her up in his arms, family members – who hadn’t visited in years but now filtered in and out of our home like a crowd at a petting zoo – praised him for how good he was. “Such a great dad.” They’d say as he briefly held her before relinquishing her to me so she could bite at my nipples. My mother would come by frequently then, once repelled by my neuroticism but now begging for time at our doorstep.

“Isn’t it funny,” she said to me, rocking my child while she writhed and fussed, “how you don’t have time for any of that anxiety now that someone is relying on you? All these years, and it seems that’s all you’ve ever needed. Someone important enough to toughen you up.” She hands my daughter back to me and gets up to depart. There’s no gentle embrace, no encouragement, just an understanding that we stand at a vast divide. Me and the Bad Things, her and the rest of the world. The fragile bundle in my arms at the center. I hear the door swing shut, and at once, the emptiness that had opened up at the very core of me upon her birth expanded outward to devour my extremities.

…

Sometimes, shamefully, standing over her crib in the dead of night, I pondered how easy it would be for something so tiny and fragile to disappear. “Nobody would know.” The Bad Things would whisper in my ear. “It could be an unfortunate accident.” I’d back away slowly, repulsed by my hideous thoughts, and trip over my own feet on my way back to the bedroom, where Brad would trace my stretch-marked hips and eye me like a field prepped for the next harvest. “Just think – soon enough, she’ll be asking for siblings.” The very idea sent me into a panic, and he would watch as I shuddered, curling in on myself, concealing my tender parts from him. “What’s wrong?” He’d ask dumbly.

I wished I could saw open my skull and hoist my slop of abnormalities on the kitchen table, serve them up with a fork, and tell him to eat.

…

When our daughter began to toddle around the house, I’d watch with bated breath for a broken arm or nose or skull. I smothered her every movement in doubt until eventually, Brad intervened and delegated me to another room while he allowed her the luxury of making mistakes. All I could see around every corner – from the child-locked pantries containing possible poisons to the covered electrical sockets, to the trinkets she could suffocate on – was death. What would be the point of it all – of all this sacrifice, if she died? Was that a selfish thought to have? I’d yet to see her as my own; just this bizarre, otherworldly being that had crawled out of my lower body.

My hair started falling out in clumps that I’d yank from my scalp and plaster to the shower walls like an abstract art piece. I dropped fifteen pounds and was frequently ill with this or that illness, my immune system toiling under the constant glut of stress weighing on my mind. I wouldn’t know for some time if our daughter was more goodness than Bad Things, which only heightened my grief because Brad was breathing down my neck like a rabid animal in heat. “Let’s have another.” He’d say, pinching me in places that used to be pleasurable but now only writhed at his touch. Not again. I couldn’t do it again. I wasn’t sure I’d even survived it the first time.

Perhaps this is purgatory, and I’d passed on the moment she’d passed through me. I started hoarding morning-after pills, dry-swallowing them like candy. I don’t think I was going about it the right way, because I was always experiencing side effects like prolonged menstrual bleeding and abdominal pain.

…

As time went on, I began to catch glimpses of the inevitable. Antisocial tendencies when urging her to play with other children. Fussily stacking all her toys until the corners aligned, repeating the routine each time something was moved a centimeter out of place. Pacing around her bedroom, gnawing on her hair, some vacant expression painting her face. She once screamed for twenty minutes after accidentally tripping on a crack in our driveway, convinced she had shattered me. Ever since then, she always made an effort to stretch her tiny legs over every break in the pavement.

The doctors I dragged her to, one after the other, all simply dismissed her as a fussy child. Brad insisted I was paranoid. My mother told me to stop impressing my delusions upon her, dooming her to my childhood fate – an indiscernible blur of anguish and restlessness, one maladjusted habit after another, battle after battle for a tidbit of internal relief amidst a constant state of negative hyper-arousal. But I knew the truth, and I knew she did too. The Bad Things aren’t picky. That’s what makes them unfair.

I’d watch her bounding through our home and inexplicably, I’d start to cry, because I couldn’t help but see her as anything but this fragile, unaware wildflower about to be swallowed up by a lurking black hole. It made her that much harder to look at, to interact with, to care for. Brad would shake me by the shoulders, look me sternly in the eyes, and say, “She’ll start to think you hate her if you keep crying like that. Be happy for once. Put on a smile. Show her something positive, Bea. I know you’ve got it in you.” I’d try, I really would. But good thoughts are something I’ve long since been incapable of, and though I’d hoped so badly she would have inherited Brad’s frustrating reliance on optimism, I just knew that wasn’t the case. Every time she interacted with me, she appeared to me like a dead animal in the jaws of a predating wolf.

…

At five years old, she came running up to me in the kitchen. I was throwing something together, chopping vegetables with shiny new knives gifted to us by Brad’s parents, red handles with silver tips. Tears were glistening in her eyes, and I had an immediate mental image of my daughter lying belly-up on the cutting board, fileted like a fish. She tugged on my apron and in a moment of impulsivity, I tossed everything – cutting board and knives and potatoes and all – into the sink. We ordered takeout that night.

I knelt at her level and debated on whether or not to take her hand. When was the last time I’d held her hand? Held her at all? She was deeply concerned about a cardinal that was huddled in our living room windowsill, afraid it was going to freeze to death out in the snow. The more she described the animal, the harder she sobbed, rubbing furiously at her eyes until they became bloodshot. I insisted to her that cardinals are accustomed to the snow, but she wasn’t satisfied with my answer and started bombarding me with questions. What if that cardinal doesn’t like the snow? What if it’s injured? What if it needs food? What if a fox gets to it? What if, what if, what if. Death, death, death. Something about that line of questioning made my stomach hurt. I didn’t eat the takeout that night.

The tears kept flowing from her eyes and I tried my best to console her, to attempt to be supportive and maternal, two things I’d failed at miserably in her lifetime. I thought about that failure, let it sink its claws into me, her wails rebounding between my eardrums like nails on a chalkboard. My patience quickly waned, and I pulled the curtains shut behind us to take her mind off of it, inexplicably metamorphosed into my mother, and spoke with her tongue. “Listen, the bird is fine. You’re overthinking it. Go play now and stop crying.”

She sniffled, wiped her eyes with her sleeve between gasps for air, and backed away from me as though I were some kind of monster. When I woke up early the next morning, I ripped open the curtains and felt like the world would fall out from underneath me. There was the cardinal, lying rigor-mortis, on our windowsill, just where we’d left it yesterday. I made Brad go out and dispose of it, told my daughter it flew away and was afraid that at any moment, I’d see in her what I’d seen the night before, in the way she fretted and sobbed and double-checked the window every half hour until her bedtime: the Bad Things that worsened in us with every year that passed by.

…

I blinked, and she was turning thirteen, blowing out candles on a chocolate cake. I felt like I was always viewing life through a blurry lens. When had she gotten so big? How did we get here? There was so much I couldn’t recall, a life in bits and pieces, memories corroded away by the all-consuming act of existing, of keeping my pulse at the baseline, of keeping her alive.

“Look,” Brad said, guiding me over to the kitchen table with a hand on my back, candle smoke still wafting through the air. “Mom is feeling well enough to have cake with us today.” He shot me a poignant glare. Our marriage was on the rocks, a tedious saga marked by constant tension. I slept in a separate bedroom with three locks on the door like a structural chastity belt. I was a ghastly human being. Chicken broth and crackers three times a day. Purple bruising beneath my eyes. Frankenstein’s bride. Medications and holistic remedies littered the vanity, the kitchen table, the living room. There was no order to the madness. I could clean it up another day, brush my teeth another day, attend our daughter’s recital or awards ceremony or softball game another day. Tomorrow, tomorrow, tomorrow, and then whatever comes next – death, death, death.

She didn’t react to my touch when I hobbled over to her place at the head of the table and hugged her. She didn’t react to much those days, always sulking, always crying when she thought we couldn’t hear it, always skipping school and retreating to some dark corner. I told her I loved her, choking, having tried to push through an ounce of goodness that I know I don’t possess. She wrenched herself from my grasp, retreating to her room and slamming her door, shutting me out; something I reasoned I deserved. I attempted to follow her, but Brad caught me by the wrist. “Let her go. Remember what the therapist said.” I don’t want to remember what the therapist said because speaking about it confirms what I’ve known all along.

…

When I was younger, there was a sentiment my mother used to impart when she was angry with me: “I hope you have a child twice as bad as you someday.” Twice as bad as she was after all. Full of twice as many Bad Things.

…

I would collect six orange pill bottles from the pharmacist every month.

Only five of them were for me.

…

It was her twenty-first birthday, and rather than parading around the town in a fun-drunk stupor with friends she never made, she waited patiently for me to bring her flowers. She was nothing more than a small notch in an overgrown lawn. Death, death, death. Brad stood five feet away from me, shaking with anger and grief and whatever can describe the unfiltered hatred you have for your ex-wife. “This is all your fault.” He spat. “She got this from your side of the family.” I had no right to argue with him like we had so many times before, like the moment he discovered my stash of emergency contraceptives in the bathroom vanity and any illusion of trust between us shattered like glass. He was right. Bad Things.

We’d come home from meeting with the divorce lawyer – all formalities, as Brad by now had fallen in love once more – and came upon her, cold and stiff, heaped upon her bedroom floor, a ruddy mess left in her wake, signifying her departure. “So sorry for your loss”, said the flurry of bodies cycling in and out our front door. The cleaners who had to tear up all the carpet in her bedroom and the cops who came to collect a statement and the funeral director who came to tote her body off to be beautified for the afterlife – a life I hoped would at least be better than the one she felt necessary to forcibly exit.

Her obituary had been short. What do you even say about somebody who only lived twenty years? Somewhere in the middle of the sorrowful blurb, I was described as “the mother”, and Brad the “fun-loving, dedicated father”. I imagine adjectives are wasted on husks.

When I returned to our empty home, the weight of my grief, the sudden lack of her in my life, fully manifested, and all the benevolent feelings I’d failed to grasp since her conception flooded my body like a typhoon. It bowled me over, snatched the breath from my lungs, pulled at my tear ducts, and took me to my knees. The love, the longing, the nostalgia, where had they been all along? Cursed as I was, I could feel my love for her spilling over into regret, excruciation unlike anything I’d ever endured. Unlike any kind of Bad Thing.

I ran to grab the knife block off the kitchen counter, beaten from years of use. I cradled it in the crook of my neck, dropped to the floor in her empty bedroom that was stripped down to the stained concrete, and pulled out the blades one by one. One. Two. Three. Four. Five. Seven. Eight. Nine. Ten. Eleven. Twelve. The Bad Things had found her. I had raised livestock and sent her to the slaughterhouse. I hated myself. I hated Brad. I hated womanhood. I hated the Bad Things and the lineage that indebted me to them.

I walked over to her bed and pressed my face into one of her pillows. Strands of her copper hair still clung to the fabric. Later that night I’d tediously pull them out and collect them in a Ziploc bag. I’d store it in my closet and apologize to it for the rest of my life. Her pillowcase still smelled like lavender shampoo. I don’t think I ever realized until then what kind of shampoo she used. It’s funny, the things you notice when you’re attuned to sorrow. The teddy bear on her bookshelf that belonged to her infancy. The laptop where she always had something to hide. The notebook where she bade us farewell.

I felt all my organs constricting and releasing, forcing a guttural cry up through my center. I took a shallow breath, collapsed to the floor in a heap, and like a proper mother, I wailed.

 … 

I lie trembling on the bathroom floor, incapacitated by fear. My tailbone aches from the prolonged minutes spent with my head between my knees. The test in my hands is positive, despite my best efforts to foil and dissuade him. His desire for fatherhood trumps my health and comfort, it seems. I think about destroying the evidence, but he has eyes in the back of his head and senses finely attuned to trickery. I imagine he’ll see the damning pee sticks and pounce on me like a mountain lion.

No sooner than I begin considering my options does Brad knock on the door. “Are you okay? Let me in.” My heart stops and I scramble to hide the test. I settle for unceremoniously shoving it in my underwear, scrambling to my feet as to appear unassuming, which I’ve never once succeeded at in my life. He intrudes, sees this, and immediately begins the game of twenty questions before I pivot and attempt to turn his attention elsewhere. The sour smell of a day spent working on the house clings to him and it makes me gag. I hate that I gag because now he will assume the very thing I want him to avoid.

“Actually, I’ve got a migraine. Can you go out and grab some ibuprofen? I think I’m out.” This luckily, is not a lie. I ran out earlier in the week. Ibuprofen is a dear friend. As are Prozac and Pepto Bismol and Melatonin. Brad, for all his obliviousness, understands my ceaseless need for manufactured, short-term relief and runs to grab his keys, suspicion still lining his features.

“All right…I’ll be right back. Call me if you need anything else. And please, try to get some rest at least?” After I watch his pickup pull out of the driveway and down the darkened road, I release a breath I don’t even realize I’ve been holding. I scramble into the bedroom, the picture of panic, my mind fizzling with a million thoughts. I’d been so careful, popping Plan B like a lifeline, neglecting his advances when I could get away with it. I tug my fingers through my hair, threatening to pull it out by the root. I consider the distance between our home and the nearest drugstore. I subtract time spent searching for solutions that do not exist.

I dive under our bed and sift through piles of yet-to-be-utilized pastel onesies and uncover the knife block, swaddled in wads of bubble wrap like a newborn babe. A gift from Brad’s parents, shiny red handles and silver tips. I sprint into the bathroom, lock the door, strip down in the bathtub, and run the water scalding hot. I soak until my nerves become deadened to the burn, skin flushed lobster red. The bathroom is quickly engulfed in thick condensation, and I curiously find that the cloudier it gets, the clearer my mind becomes.

I grab a serrated blade and examine it under the harsh fluorescent light before taking a meditative breath that holds the weight of all my worries. Yes, it’s clear to me now: there is no other way. I plunge the knife deep between my legs, screaming and reaching beyond – beyond the place where Brad plants his deepest desires, beyond the irritating probing of my gynecologist, beyond the genesis of my womanhood. This, I have decided, is an act of mercy. I cut the evil off at the source, excruciatingly voiding myself of soft tissue and entrails, the porcelain tub stained crimson by my ambition. I imagine her floating there among the offensive refuse, no longer a potential victim of this rabid, unstoppable disease. For the first time in my life, I am filled to the brim with enthusiasm. Yes, this is the only way.

I hear his truck crunching over our gravel driveway. The front door squeals on rusty hinges and he calls out my name. But there’s a ringing in my ears that makes him sound like some dreamy, distant echo. Brad clomps up the stairs, throws open the bedroom door, pivots on his heels down the hall with a squeak of his boots, and knocks softly once. “Bea?” Then again, more insistently when I don’t answer. When he realizes my silence is purposeful. “Bea, I know you’re in there! The hallway is flooded! What are you doing?” I don’t answer, growling like a rabid dog as I add another blade into the fray, biting down and splitting my tongue in two, copper between my molars. I hear him walk away, only to return moments later, his panic far more palpable now. “BEA! Open this door! NOW!” A fit of laughter bubbles up my throat, despite it all. How long has it been since I last laughed? I giggle in fits and starts, blood dribbling down my chin as I finally succeed in yanking the offensive organ from its roots deep within me.

The deed is done.

“BEA! OPEN THIS FUCKING DOOR!” He sputters into tears, hysterically sobbing and splintering the hardwood with his fists. The noise he makes creates an opportunity to tip my head towards the ceiling and howl. Wolf and a woman – ruthless and instinctual and protective, that is my nature. That is my curse. I press my lips to the soft exterior of my undone womanhood. Now, she is finally safe. Me and my girl. I share a special secret with her:

“I did all of this for you. You know that, right?” I did this because I love you. I’ve loved you before I even knew you. Before you ever existed. That’s why we can never see each other, you and me. You understand that, don’t you? It might not make sense to you now, but I promise you, this is just how it has to be. I love you so much. That’s why I knew this had to be done. That’s why I’m here to protect you.” Every word is honeyed in a deep maternal love I never thought myself capable of. I want to shove her in my mouth and chew, sink my teeth into her unrealized cells, and savor these final moments we have alone. Every dizzying, paranoid part of me has come undone, snapped like a cord under tension, and all that’s left of me is the scraps – my flesh and bones and the hair atop my head.

My vision starts to swim. The adrenaline gives way to searing-hot pain, lacerating me from the inside out. I know that we’re near the end of our time together. We only have these last moments. I cradle her in my arms and try to imagine, just for a minute, the life we could have had, had I chosen to allow her to fester for longer. I can’t see anything different than the obvious. I know that I’ve made the right choice, as no goodness could have come out of a life like ours.

I hear boots thundering down the hallway, insistent voices intermingling with Brad’s panicked one, urging me to open the door, men of different uniforms. They start bludgeoning the entrance with something solid: open up, open up, open up. Death, death, death. But I can see now, that is not such a bad thing. It’s an embrace, an end, and with it, the termination of everything that’s ever ailed me.

The world outside the bathroom window is bathed in vivid reds and blues. Snow trickles down in pillowy flurries. A cardinal cozies up on the windowsill. A picturesque, Christmas card winter. I find it astoundingly beautiful. “Remember, I love you with my whole heart.” I croak, too weak to hold onto her any longer, bleeding lucidity as rapidly as I bleed final breaths. With a kiss goodbye, my hands unfurl and she sinks gradually towards the bottom. Towards freedom. Now, I can finally rest.

With a sound like a gunshot, the door is ripped from its hinges, splinters flying like projectiles. A blur of bodies cram themselves into the tiny space, grappling to yank me from the warmth of the bathtub, pale and limp. There’s a host of colorful curses that sound foreign to my dimming eardrums, someone gagging towards the floor tiles, a voice I once thought I could love designating me as a demon. All I can do is flash him a wobbly smile as he drops down to his knees and screams. The tears fall heavy down Brad’s cheeks, but mine feel all the sweeter.

This is for you, Evangeline.

The Bad Things end with me.