Joel Arnold - Fetal Bait Apocalypse - 3 Collections in 1

The movers we hire are fast and efficient. We spend the first week taking down wall-paper, painting, cleaning, arranging furniture. We start with the living room, then the master bedroom. We move on to the baby’s room. The paint we choose is a bright, sunny yellow. We buy a crib, bedding, a changing table. My mother sends us a mobile to hang above the crib, a mobile of tiny stuffed bears and tigers and birds. When it turns, a song plays. I can picture the baby reaching up with her tiny pink hand, wondering what these little creatures are hanging above her. The thought makes me smile. The thought takes some of the anger away.

There is one room in the basement that we’re not quite sure what to do with. It’s a small room, only five by five. An old well room, we think. But now it’s only an empty cement cell, bare and dingy. Its door is paneled like the rest of the basement wall, and is hard to see unless you look closely. Then you see the small metal latch that opens it and its faint outline in the wall. It will make a good storage room, perhaps.

I meet some of the neighbors. Ken and Linda Hughes who live next door bring us fresh baked bread as a house-warming gift. John and Lisa Solomon from down the street pass by nightly while walking their German shepherd. Betty Sandford, an elderly widow who comes by on our seventh night here, asking if we’ve seen her cat, Princess.

At work, my imagination runs rampant. It’s hard to concentrate on the balance sheets, the expense reports, the reconciliations. Instead, I see my wife driving away from our house and meeting up with Mr. Wishlow at some cheap hotel, fulfilling her part of whatever bargain they struck as she’s down on all fours, letting him inside of her. The brashness of it, the audacity of him, placing himself so disgustingly close to our unborn child.

I have to get up from my desk often, take short walks around the office building to keep myself from yelling with rage.

That night when Ellen is gone, I begin to smell something. Something in the attic. Rotting. I set a ladder beneath the square of plywood and push it aside, raising my head above the attic floor. There is a buzz of flies like the hum of a high voltage power line. I shine a flashlight along the attic walls, and at first I see nothing but insulation, a thick pink snow. Then something catches my eye. A gray paw sticking up. And the flies circling it. A cat.

I get gloves and carefully climb into the attic, making sure to keep my weight on the wooden beams. I lift the cat up out of the insulation. Its belly has been sliced open. Its insides have been taken out. I wonder how long it’s been there.

The next evening, I hear Ellen answer the phone after one short ring. I turn down the volume of the television and try to listen. She speaks quietly, yet I hear her, the words like needles pushed into my ears.

“Not tonight. No. I can’t. Tomorrow. When he’s gone. Then we’re done.”

There is a soft click as the phone is placed back in its cradle. Anger overwhelms me. It’s as if a light bulb has exploded in my skull. I want to throw something, I want to hit someone. I want to scream my fucking head off. But instead, I swallow it. I save it in my stomach, keeping it ready, like gasoline. When I face him, he will be the spark that ignites it. He will feel its burn.

At three in the morning I wake as my wife gets out of bed. I pretend to sleep and can feel her hovering over me, watching. She tiptoes out of the room. I hear four short beeps as she deactivates out alarm system. The house shudders slightly as the garage door rises and her car rumbles to life.

My God, is she that desperate, that hungry for this man that she can’t even wait until I’ve left for work?

I wait for her to come back as I toss and turn in bed, my imagination a whirlwind of lurid images and sounds. But by the time she returns and slips quietly next to me in bed, I have somehow managed to fall asleep.

The next day after I get home from work, I can’t stand it anymore. I had spent the whole time thinking I could just let it go, just swallow the thoughts, the suspicions I had, but now they burst up into my throat like acid.

“What kind of deal did you make with him?” I ask. “Did you have to fuck him? Was that part of the deal?”

She sits on the couch, her legs tucked under her. Her eyes widen and turn to her lap. “No.”

“Don’t lie to me.” I’ve never felt this angry, this sure of something in my whole life. “Did you fuck him?”

“No,” she insists.

“Look me in the eye and tell me that. Tell me, ‘I did not fuck him.’”

She puts her face in her hands and shakes her head, then starts rocking back and forth. I can feel it now. I can tell she is going to break. I feel satisfaction coming on along with a new sense of nausea. The whole situation is unreal, and I don’t want it to be happening, but I have to hear her answer. I have to hear it.

This time I yell. “Did you fuck him?”

She looks up at me. Tears stream down her face, but she looks me in the eye and says, “You bastard, you goddamn bastard. No. I did not fuck him.”

I stand there watching her, waiting for her gaze to break, but it doesn’t. It seems like we are frozen like that for hours, yet it is only a matter of seconds before she mumbles the next words

“ He gave me a second option.”

My gut twists in on itself. Even though part of me is so completely sure she slept with the real estate agent to get our house, there’s another larger part that thinks the whole idea was ridiculous. And now these words. Second option .

“And what was that?” I ask. “What was your second option?”

She stands up. Her eyes flash. “Why can’t you trust me? You’ve never trusted me.” She storms out of the room.

The next night, the buzz of flies is so loud I can hear it through the ceiling like a muffled power generator. I wait until Ellen leaves, get my gloves, and climb into the attic again. The smell is intense.

It’s a dog this time. A big German shepherd, lay across two beams on its side, it’s back haunches and snout sticking above the pink insulation. Is it the same dog I’ve seen the Solomon’s out walking night after night? My God.

It’s hard work removing it. The thing is heavy, but again, the insides have been scooped out.

I confront Ellen about the dog. It is strange accusing my five month pregnant wife of this deed. Accuse? That is too harsh of a word. I question her. But instead of pleading ignorance and acting shocked and disgusted, she just stares at me. Looks me in the eye. Tears run down her cheeks as she says, “I told you, I did not fuck him.” How do you respond to something like that? I shut down. Walk away. Sit at my desk and stare at a blank computer screen for over an hour.

Even though we spend that night in the same bed, we might as well be on opposite sides of the world. The space between us seems infinite and cold. I can barely sleep, and when I do, it is only for minutes at a time.

At work the next day, I realize I have never met our real estate agent, Mr. Wishlow. He is faceless and dark in my imagination. He looms like a giant shadow in the corners of my mind. I can barely get any work done. When my boss asks what’s wrong, I tell him I can’t talk about it. I mumble something about family troubles.

When I get home, I find Ellen groaning in the bathroom. Her face is ashen. When I ask her what is wrong, she breaks down and collapses in my arms. I feel her tears warm and wet on my shoulder. “What is it?” I ask.

“The baby,” she says. “The baby.”

She crumples to the floor, her body heaving. She’s hysterical. Blood trickles from beneath her skirt.

I take her to the emergency room. They tend to her, give her a sedative, tell her everything is going to be all right. A young intern takes me aside and tells me Ellen has miscarried. He asks me what she did with the fetus.