Free All the Anxious Girls on Earth by Zsuzsi Gartner Page A

died. And,” she paused, “its also the day Teddie was born.” She sat back. “You probably think that’s just a coincidence.”
    Then she laid her cheek against the back of the front passenger seat and just looked at Jack as the streetlights cast elongated shadows across her features like smallchildren making shadow puppets with their hands. I want the one that looks like a rabbit with big floppy ears, Jack thought, just before closing his eyes against the crackle of the taxis dispatch radio and Daisy’s altogether too bright face.

    The fetus is proving remarkably uncooperative, claiming no prior knowledge of ancient Hebrew and insisting that as far as he knows “Jesus Christ” is just a curse their mother frequently uses. Daisy says, “Were going to try some word association. I’m going to say a word and you just blurt out the first thing that pops into your head.” Even as they begin, the fetus is losing interest and his answers come to her as if from behind a distant pane of glass. “Light?” “Dark.” “Road?” “Car.” “Damascus?” “Table-cloth.” Daisy can’t contain her fury. She grabs him by the umbilical cord and yanks him towards her. “You’re not even trying.” The fetus’s eyes go wide. “Go easy on me, sis, I haven’t even been born yet!”
    It’s clear to Daisy that she doesn’t scare him. Not a bit. Reef urchin, mud urchin, swamp biscuit. She could chew him up, stick her finger down her throat, and puke up the pieces. Daisy is certain her mother would like that.

    Jack woke up on the couch, Ganesh, the elephant-headed Hindu god, imprinted on his face from the embroidered throw cushion wedged under his pounding head. He felt so cramped he thought he’d need help from a teamof experts just to get his legs unfolded. It was morning—still dark out, but he could hear a garbage truck grinding by, cans clanking against the sidewalk.
    He must have fallen asleep in the cab and then barely made it through the door. Now he was becoming the kind of guy who couldn’t even make it upstairs to bed before passing out with his pants off, but his socks and shirt still on. The kind of guy whose girlfriend believed in reincarnation and was capable of leaving him for someone she thought was not only one of the apostles in a past life, but her own brother as well. At least that’s what Jack thought Daisy thought.
    Wouldn’t that make it incest? They’d have to move to a remote hamlet in the mountains and moonlight in all sorts of odd jobs in order to feed their brood of hypnotically pale, jug-eared children. They’d have goats, and no television. Maybe a ham radio. There’d be a stack of placenta casseroles in the deep freeze for a rainy day. Maybe they’d be happy. Didn’t Daisy deserve to be happy?
    Daisy’s laughter rang out, enveloping him warmly in a kind of nostalgia. She was already in the kitchen, making coffee. “That was great last night, wasn’t it, Jack?” she called out, as if Jack wasn’t scrunched into a painful shape on the couch, an elephant-headed deity etched into the skin on the left side of his face. As if everything was back to normal and they were huddled together upstairs under the duvet, each of them hesitant to be the first to break away. “He’s just got so much energy,” Daisy sang out, almost operatically, as she headed upstairs to the bath. She was the only person he’d ever known whotook baths instead of showers, even in the morning. “So much zest for life!”
    He should tell Irene, Jack thought. A mother deserved to know when her only child was in danger of going off the rails. They could have lunch again. Cocktails! Maybe she’d invite him to come by. I
know it might sound foolish
, Jack would tell her, sweating lightly under his Kevlar vest, looking furtively left, then right,
but now I’m worried about Daisy because she seems too happy
.
    Jack reached for the phone on the floor beside the couch. Irene was probably still in bed, sleeping off