Shane Kowalski
I know I should not be pleased that my brother's wife has given birth to a malformed baby. I know I should not be happy that the baby is hideous.
But I cannot help myself.
My brother and his wife and me: We three have had our issues. Unmendable tensions. Hushed hostilities.
That's not to say that I am just saying the baby is malformed and hideous out of spite. The baby is scary. It reminds me of something you might find at the bottom of a murky lake. It should be in a jar of formaldehyde in a dark room. There is a tiny, second head attached to its neck, like a little bruised gourd. Two heads! My nephew—nephews?—when he cries sounds like the hiss of phone static. When his eyes dart around you cannot tell from which set of eyes he is seeing you.
The rest of the family has tried to throw comfort onto my brother and his wife, but they do not say the baby is cute as a button or that it looks just like my brother or his wife, etc. They won't go that far. They say that the baby is beautiful in its own way and that my brother and his wife will love it no matter what. My brother and his wife just look at them. I can't tell what they think or want to think.
My brother's wife's mother says the baby is healthy otherwise and that's the important part. Then she says, Matthew is healthy, that is all that counts.
Before the birth, my brother's wife said if it was a boy they were going to name it after her grandfather, Matthew.
Matthew's a nice name, everyone agreed.
We're still thinking about it, my brother and his wife now say.
All of us look at the dark, wriggling thing in my brother's wife's arms. It looks like something on the verge of violence. Something that crawled from the depths of the earth and is hungry now.
We are all silent for a bit. The baby hisses a little while. Every once in a while a different nurse will pass by the room and peek in through the window to catch a glimpse of it.
I can't tell but I think I am smiling a little. I am smiling while everyone else is sobered, unanimated, quiet. Too sober and too quiet for any birth.
But I am smiling. And after a time I can feel my brother's eyes on me and then my brother's wife's eyes on me. They are staring at me with those darkened, hurt eyes of theirs as I smile and smile, bigger and bigger. I can't help it.
I say: Why so sad? You have a baby now.
Nobody says anything. The hospital beeps in the silence.
What? I say. You should be happy. You wanted a baby. You have a baby.
My brother and his wife look down at their baby. It hisses and lifts its second head from its face and releases a dark wisp of smoke in the air that sours the smell in the room almost instantly. Everyone pretends not to notice it.
That seems to me how these things get started: you don't notice it for a while or you choose not to notice it until you really do have to notice it, it's right there, under your nose, changing your senses—this sourness—but by then, being so far past the point of first rot, you must keep up the appearance of not noticing it. If you are the first to notice it, someone will just say, Well, why didn't you do something about it when it first happened? Why didn't you do something?
I think I know what we'll name our baby, my brother says. I just got it. We'll name him Foster. After my little brother.
Everyone is silent. They look at me. My little nephew hisses at me, with love. Under all ugliness, I know, there is love.
Foster, he says again while stroking the baby's ugly foreheads. A very good name for our baby.