The muscles in my arms and back twitch whenever I hear those kinds of stories. Like that boy out in California who threw his pregnant wife over the side of a boat, or that black boy who played ball for the Panthers and stuffed his pregnant girlfriend in the trunk of his car. I’d have no problem killing them. Even said so to my father once that I’d like nothing better than to get my hands around them boys’ throats and squeeze. He just sort of looked at me sideways and didn’t say nothing, like he agreed but didn’t believe me. 

      Now I got a wife, with a kid on the way, and it’s something I never really planned on. At seventeen she ain’t but a kid herself, young enough almost to be my child. She’s standing at the door to the cellar, everything about her so skinny except her stomach, which stills shows though the giant T-shirt she wears like a dress. We been married four months, she’s been pregnant seven. What choice did we have? Her thin legs run straight as a board from the T-shirt to an old pair of my hunting socks she’s got on. Her mouth is moving, and I think she’s saying something but I can’t hear the words. All I can see is mouths to feed, a lifetime bare cupboards and empty promises.

      For a moment I’m stung by something. The kind of shock that comes on in a flash and before you know it you’re already doing something stupid. Like on the highway behind a slow-ass driver, your teeth grinding, hands gripping the wheel, so you punch the gas and are halfway by before you come to your senses and realize how foolish it all is. Just like that. And she’s asking if I need something from the cellar, and I see me get up and walk over to her, one hand on the doorknob, the other supporting her belly, and tell her that I do. She turns, and as her foot finds the first step my hand reaches her back and I push. I see her falling, bouncing on the stairs, but I don’t hear her scream. Maybe that’s what it was like for them boys out in California and North Carolina. You can see but can’t hear. And she’s laying knocked out cold at the bottom of the stairs, and to make sure it’s finished I have to go down and gently pick her up and bring her to the top again, stand her up and tilt her forward and let her fall, again. And all the while the world’s quieter than hell.

      Slowly the sound returns, and from a distance I hear her voice, and there’s fear in it, like a child trying to wake a drunk father because the postman’s at the door.

      “Reggie,” she says. “Reggie?”

      I come back from wherever I was and she’s still standing there, her hand really clutching the doorknob now. I can see a chill running up her bare legs.

      “Reggie, you okay?” she asks.

      I nod.

      “You need anything from the cellar?”

      I stand and walk over to her. I reach for her cheek and it’s hot against my cold palm. I let it sit there for a moment, absorbing her warmth, before bending over and putting both hands gently on her stomach. It’s swollen round, the skin beneath the T-shirt stretched to the point of breaking, and I cup her belly like one of them globes we used to have in primary school.

      “Reggie what’s wrong?” she asks.

      “Nothing,” I say. And the breath that’s been caught up in my chest for so long is finally freed and I can breathe again. Inside her I feel our future kicking around. “Marianne, I don’t need nothing from the cellar.”

      She don’t say nothing, just waits until I take my hands away. When I do, she turns to go down the steps. “Reggie, you scare me sometimes,” she says.

      But she goes down into the cellar on her own two feet. The passage is dim, the darkness musty. Water keeps leaking in and I’ll have to make some repairs down there eventually. I stand there watching her waddle down, shifting her weight back and forth in some great big balancing act. And I wait until she see-saws back up, hoping and praying the whole time that she doesn’t stumble.

Ajani Sebastian Burrell recently completed his MFA and will return to Brooklyn after one last picturesque summer in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. His short fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in The Saint Ann’s Review, The Raven Chronicles, and Fiction Weekly, among other publications.