The Baby

by Andrew Bertaina

The crying won’t stop, so I take the baby outside and rest it gently in the snow. The baby reaches up, and briefly grasps my forefinger with her five and then starts to cry. From just behind the wall I can hear my wife crying as she prepares dinner. After a while, the crying on both sides of me subsides and then it’s just me and the soft blanket of snow. Back upstairs, I take a long drink and think about the day the baby was born, a much happier day. My mother was in town, and she had her hair up in an elaborate scarf of green and gold. We drank warm tea, afterward, just us two. I think of that morning long into the night, trying to impress one on another, the snow, a constant companion, muffling the world outside with all the attentiveness of a parent quietly shushing a child.

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Andrew Bertaina currently lives and works in Washington, DC, where he obtained his MFA in creative writing from American University. My work has appeared or is forthcoming in such places as The Threepenny Review, Hobart, Literary Orphans, Fiction Southeast, Eclectica, Prick of the Spindle, Big Lucks, and Whiskey Paper and elsewhere, and he is currently a reader and book reviewer for Fiction Southeast.