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

the evening shift at Mount Sinai’s emergency ward. He pictured her beside Claude, the latest in a string of youngish, exotic men she met in the emergency ward waiting room. Daisy called them her stray pets. “Notice that none of them has ever graduated from high school,” Daisy once pointed out. “What does that tell you?” Claude, a dry-waller from Chicoutimi, had big hard hands and short legs. He was missing half a thumb. Maybe the two of them were tangled together, still sweating from a predawn grope. When Daisy’s mother pulled herself away to answer the phone, their skin would separate with a rude sucking sound and she’d have to put her hand over the receiver to laugh and wave Claude away with a kiss.
    “Hello?” Irene’s voice was thick with sleep. Or something else. Maybe Claude was calibrating the angle of her scar with his forefinger and remaining thumb. Jack softly hung up. The phone rang almost immediately. Jack looked at it as if it was a small enraged animal. A feral cat. A rabid squirrel. It was literally quivering on the floor.
    Daisy stood dripping in front of him, bathrobe open, water pooling around her feet. “Can’t you answer it?”
    She snatched up the receiver. “Hello? No, I didn’t call you. No, Jack didn’t call you. Why would he call
you?”
Daisy nudged Jack’s crotch with her bare foot and silently mouthed
my mother
, twirling her index finger in circles around her ear. Jack rolled his eyes as if to concur,
Yeah, your mom, such a kook
.
    “Well, maybe call display screwed up,” Daisy said. “It happens.”
    Jack was clenching so frantically it was as if a midway carny was yelling, “Do you wanna go faster!!??” and his muscles screamed, “Yeahhh!!” while Jack white knuckled it all the way, jacket sleeve stuffed between his teeth, vomit riding up his throat.

    The fetus claims to see things. He describes them to Daisy as if they were a series of snapshots. He stands on a front porch bundled up against the cold like a little astronaut, his face half in shadow. In the next one he’s flat on his face in the snow and a laughing woman (their mother!) reaches for him. There’s one under a Christmas tree. He holds an empty fishbowl in front of himself, his eyes distorted, lips flattened out behind the glass. He hears laughter. A green Cougar sits in the driveway. It’s full of teenagers and his legs hang out the back window, his feet in sealskin boots. More laughter. There’s a strip from a photo booth in a mall. Him and his girlfriend (Daisy’s old best friend Lynda!) making kissy faces, puttingtheir hands up each others shirts. His feathered hair hiding his eyes. He wears a T-shirt with a freaked-out cat dangling from a ledge that reads, “Hang in there, baby!”
    Daisy is filled with pity towards this sea creature who would steal what is hers. His desire to live has made him weak, he’s laid his cards on the table, forgotten how to bluff.
    He haunts her no longer. She feels supple and lively.
    Daisy starts to dance as if she’s a little girl skipping around a Maypole with other laughing little girls, wrapping bright white crepe ribbon around it. Only this cord is both solid and stringy, and warm in her hand.
    In the diffused light of the womb she dances with her brother one last time.

    Jack was sprawled on the couch thumbing through a Bible when Daisy came home. He heard her dragging her bike up the front steps and then ding dinging the little Yogi Bear bell on the handlebars.
    He’d been clenching up a storm all day, lying on the couch, ignoring the phone—including half a dozen calls from the organic exterminator wondering what was happening with his book.
(“Cucaracha!
That’s cockroach in Spanish,” he crowed on one message. “And I’ll bet you thought it was some kind of dance.”) Jack’s muscles burned—from his toes to his tortured anus. If he stood up now, his whole body would start to spasm. So he just lay there, trying to look relaxed, calling out,