My Baby
by Sacha Bissonnette
[Editor’s Note: This piece is part of the “Topical” series, with each piece solely submitted to and chosen by the Final Reader Pietra Dunmore.]
Watching him silently rearranging the strawberries in his cereal I worry he’s still got it in him. That seething, unbound rage that sits in his eyes. They can flash bright white, like phosphorus. I try not to stare at my own baby, my own flesh and blood when it happens. When he senses my concern, my judgment, he gets uncomfortable and grows angrier. We’re finally settling in, we made it this far but I worry that my baby might threaten it all again.
I warned the police not to come in a few times. I yelled through the door, not to come for his father, not here, not in front of our baby. They didn’t listen, they so rarely do. There wasn’t a weapon in the house, but in a way there was.
I tell myself that my child was protecting us, that he did it out of love for his family and not out of hate for them. I’m still trying to teach him that there’s a fine line between the two. But when they put their knees to our backs, pressing us into the cold kitchen tiles, it was over for them.
My baby held them there, suspended, dangling like marionettes. He controlled their strings. His eyes all white and locked in, his face covered in a web of bulging veins and broken blood vessels. And that horrid shriek, and the flash. The four men smashed into the ceiling, and then fell to little pieces on the floor.
In the motel that night, I showered with my baby and held him close, against my undamaged black skin. I watched as their blood dripped from our bodies and eased into the drain. I felt the cleansing of the hot spray on the back of my neck.
Sacha John Bissonnette is a Trinidadian, French Canadian poet and short story writer living in Ottawa. His work has appeared in Wigleaf, SmokeLong Quarterly, Litro UK, Cease, Cows, The Maine Review, and elsewhere. He is nominated for Best Small Fictions. He is working on a short fiction anthology with the help of a Canada Council for the Arts grant. He loves film and tweets @sjohnb9
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What surprising, fascinating stuff can you tell us about the origin, drafting, and/or final version of “My Baby”? I wrote an entire 4000 thousand word origin story about a child’s reaction to the racist world around him, based on the histories of his two parents, but it wasn’t working. It had too many pieces and loose ends and was overly ambitious, I think. So I decided to cut it down completely, to almost a skeleton of the original story, keeping the beginning and end paragraphs and writing in a related middle.
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