A Love Story
See, when I was young I was fascinated with skateboarding.
Except I’m lying — twice. It wasn’t skateboarding as much as snakeboarding, a weird derivative that required you to twist your waist around in order to proceed forward in a blissfully crooked fashion. It hurt my boobs. I have big boobs. It hurt my boobs but it was affordable, and original, and easy once you got the hang of it, and impossible to compare with actual skateboarding, you see, that’s why I went with that laughable contraption. But more important, my second lie, I wasn’t fascinated. For my entire life minus the last couple years, and I really mean my entire life before that, believe me, I have scrutinized every single moment of it, I’ve had no experience whatsoever with fascination, or obsession, or, passion, or any of those grand feelings and burning desires one sees in movies and books and sports and sometimes even at work, and imagines being carried away by at some point in their life.
This is weird. I’m no different from your average dudette. Sure, I do snakeboard instead of skateboard, but some people put agar-agar instead of gelatin in their pudding, big deal. When it comes to the important stuff, like facing the laughable senselessness of life, my coping mechanisms are no different from yours. I’ve been waiting to be inhabited my whole life, I have desired it deeply. Sure. But for the overwhelming majority of my life, that craving had been left unfulfilled, and I lived nonetheless.
The most into skatesnakeboarding I have ever been amounts to awfully little in the grand scheme of things. Buying a few copies of snake, err, skateboarding magazines (there is no snakeboarding magazines, mind you) that I pretended were the bestest but really had no idea ever existed before bumping into them at the newspaper stand. Playing Tony Hawk Pro skater 2. Spending a handful of nights with a couple friends, between my 15th and 18th birthdays, on the parking lot a couple minutes away from my house, vaguely trying to train, pretending we would, one day, clear the sick tricks we had seen in the aforementioned magazines.
If you look at those moments in terms of teenage, they might pass as acceptable, good even when they happened during warm summer nights with a clear sky over our heads, paling before turning an ever deeper blue, punctured by shards of photons from celestial bodies lightyears away, that kind of emo BS. But if you try to consider them through the lens of passion, they were trash. We didn’t get the essence of it. I didn’t like to jump fences, the shock of the contact with the ground hurt my tits. We didn’t clear any row of steps, or break any bones, we didn’t even steal beer and get shitfaced and puke in bushes and graffiti the bus stop with used tampons and turn the whole thing into a love for self-harm and radical feminism instead of skateboarding. We were home by ten, eleven tops.
Call me lazy, I will only pretend to be offended. I can’t even get properly mad. After snakeboarding, or skateboarding, or rollerskating, or roller derbying, I tried playing the guitar. My cousin gave me a bright red Epiphone. You don’t have a clue what an Epiphone is? Well, if you’re even slightly interested in rock’n’roll, you might have heard of Gibson. If not, no biggie - it’s a guitar brand. And, as brands do, Gibson managed to have us believe its guitars were the real shit, the tool of the true connoisseur, especially their most famous model, the Les Paul. Anyone who strives for six-string dedication probably believes in the Les Paul too. Epiphone was — is — a cheap ripoff of the Les Paul, and all things considered it was perfectly fitting for who I was. It turns out that thing is fucking hard, sure, but that’s not the biggest deal – the real issue is, why would I care? I tried to come up with a reason, that I really did. I imagined myself, the lead singer/guitarist of a post punk band, blasting the faces of a mesmerized crowd of teenage boys, all infatuated with me, trying to peek under my skirt while I chained riffs with a foot on the amp. At first it seemed like a fitting motivation, the glory, the fame, the videos on MTV, the new year’s eve improvised shows, but it quickly withered away. And what remained was… nothing. The guitar made me understand that, no matter how much effort I invested in it, I was unable to understand the the specifics of passion, the nitty-gritty mechanics at play behind obsession. I just tried to replicate it like a toddler pretends to use a typewriter, except I lacked hands. How do you figure out how to grow hands? You don’t. You just drool on the keystrokes until you die.
Then I fell in love with this guy — supposedly. He was tall and he had long, curly hair, and a reputation for kissing a lot of chicks, honestly the hair must have been what I loved the most about him, a goddamn lion, that and the fact that he was cool. He had a worn out black leather jacket that he would never take off, and on the back he had drawn a threatening portrait of his pet rat — of course, he had a pet rat. His friends called him “Satan”, he was into death metal and speedball, and I figured maybe I could get cool by proxy if I managed to lay my hands on him. So I studied him a little to find out what he would enjoy, I’d love to pretend it was complicated but it just amounted to inviting him to the Hellfest and giving him head behind the public toilets there. That was the first time I ever sucked someone’s dick, it didn’t last very long and he had this little twitch when he came in my mouth, I looked up and suddenly for a second he didn’t look cool at all, I should have seen it coming.
Turns out Satan was a phoney. His rebellious attitude was but a façade, a worn out strategy to piss his parents, more particularly his mother, who he most probably was in love with. He would ask them for money for drugs and me for weird things when we would have sex, such as strangling him with a nylon stocking or twisting his nipples, and I rolled with it, I never asked questions, I wanted to be a good girlfriend, supportive of his kinks and all, but it obviously reminded him of his childhood somehow and to be honest that I found a tad weird. Anyway. When I found out my cool rebel was in fact a man-baby with temper tantrum issues, I didn’t have the heart to dump him. Thing is, A/ my plan was working, I could feel people thinking I was definitely cooler than they thought I was, B/ I don’t know, I guess I kinda liked Satan anyway? Probably because discovering how uncool cool people actually are makes them more relatable? And C/ All things considered the whole weird sex was pretty enjoyable, really. I felt I had a way healthier relationship to deviance than he did, and in a way it was flattering. I bought more nylon stocking and we moved in together a few months later because why not.
It’s around that time that I discovered Football Manager. I have no memory of how it happened, really. Did someone at work tell me about it? Did I read a review? Fuck it. Next thing I know, I’m the manager of Yeovil Town in the English fourth division, ready to do whatever it takes to win the European Champions League one day. Bizarre. I’m not really into football in general, or let’s say I’m conflicted about football. On one hand, my father always hated it and looked down on it, arguing that it made people stupid and violent and that so little actually happened on the field having to focus on it for 90+ minutes was more akin to torture than it was to entertainment. And that opinion made sense to me, as did most of what dad says, for a long time I’ve been a daddy’s little girl, and daddy was impulse free. On the other hand, goals. Literal goals. If you ask me, that’s the reason why this sport became more and more popular as religion withered down. Football is about scoring goals, everyone on the field is focused on that clear objective, that and stopping the other team from doing so. Françoise Giroud (is she Olivier Giroud’s mother, by the way?) used to say that football is war without death, I disagree, football is whisky without hangovers, it’s cocaine without punctured septum, it’s not as much about dominance as it is about orgasm, you never come as intensely as when you’ve been able to circumvent a cock block but the true appeal, here, is about satisfying one’s desire, not necessarily submitting one’s foe. Then again, a game about soccer, though? And one that looked more like a collection of spreadsheets than anything else? I wasn’t so sure.
And yet, Yeovil. I’m not even sure where Yeovil is, to be fair, I guess it’s some shithole right in the middle of the English countryside, the club wasn’t impressive, to say the least. A 5000 seats stadium, most of the A squad over 30, bald and overweight, and a trophy cabinet emptier than my mother’s laugh the evening before she hung herself (She missed. The rope
snapped. THAT actually made her laugh, mind you). After a few hours spent figuring out the basics of how the game worked, I understood I had to change a lot of things if I were to kick my path to glory through the potato field of lower leagues English football. I tweaked training schedules, designed a top notch 3–3–1–3 tactic with a lot of focus on gegenpressing and counterattack, begged the board for a couple extra scouts. But I knew that wouldn’t cut it. If I were to rule this round world, I needed a revolution — but I didn’t have Quatari money to fund it. My plan thus became to go shopping for cheap, young players abroad and train the living shit out of them to turn them into übermenschen.
So I started exploring the darkest, most remote, and more importantly cheapest parts of Europe. I grabbed myself a Finnish center back, a couple wingers from Poland, an Algerian striker that was out of a job after having spent 7 years playing for Nice… And then I found him. It’s his Flair stat that immediately caught my attention. See, with a good physical trainer, you can easily improve your player’s pace, jump or stamina. Tactical attributes are harder to raise, but I’ve heard stories of full backs that went from running all over the field like headless chicken in their early 20s to mastering placement and anticipation to perfection before reaching 30. But Flair is nothing like that. Flair is the football equivalent of genius, and you don’t teach genius, I should know. But this guy, who was 20 years old, also had a 20 as a Flair stat — the highest possible score. I’m not sure what I was expecting, browsing through the roster of Agro Chișinău, Moldova, but it surely wasn’t it.
The thing is, most of his other stats were hidden. The game works like that: when you go sniffing around low-end clubs, it simulates your lack of insight by only showing you a couple stats out of the 30+ that compose each player’s sheet. There was no way my board would agree to me sending a scout to fucking Moldova, they probably didn’t even know where that was, so I was in the dark. Spending my entire remaining transfer budget on this dude was quite a bet, but I just knew I had to, so I did. I paid £12k to buy back his contract, a laughably low sum in football terms, an absolute fortune for Yeovil and me.
Two game days later, Sergiu Epureanu was a member of Yeovil Town FC. And I didn’t know it yet, but my life had already changed.
He didn’t just have a 20 in flair. His physical attributes were rather high — he had an impressive 16 for acceleration and a decent 14 for strength, not bad for a central attacking midfield. His tactical abilities were way above average, especially considering his age. But what really blew me away were his technical grades. 18 for ball control and passing, 17 for set pieces, 16 for
dribbling and an amazing 19 for creativity. He was a monster.
I immediately decided to put him as the 1 in my 3–3–1–3 and give him the keys to my rotten kingdom. The responsibility was huge, he would be my team’s main playmaker and have to organize all our offensive moves, while not even speaking the language. Turns out, talking isn’t needed when you’re as incredible a baller as Sergiu. For his first 4 matches, he scored 7 goals, provided 9 assists, and made sure we started a winning streak that I hoped would never end. Then Satan put a hand on my shoulder.
He had been waiting for me to go to bed, it was now 6AM on a Sunday morning, I had not eaten, not slept, not seen time pass by. I shivered, I was cold. I wanted to keep playing, that’s all I wanted, but Satan took my pointing nipples for an invitation and grabbed my boobs from behind, and I was so out there that I couldn’t even find the words to protest and explain I had better things to do, I just clunched onto my mouse and started prepping the team for our big match against Barnet FC, Satan was on his knees pulling on my panties, a very important fixture indeed, they were top of the table but we could close the gap between us and them should we win this too, Satan pulled me by the waist so that I would sit on the edge of my chair, of course the first name I picked was Sergiu, asking him to adopt an offensive stance and focus on counterattack while the rest of the team tried everything not to concede, Satan put a finger in me, I was focused on my team’s possession stat, we were being harassed from both sides of the pitch but we held still and Sergiu was once again incredible, Satan put his dick inside me, nobody could take the ball away from him, he would dribble through the entire opposite team, he would prepare to shoot, he would fire, Satan came inside of me, Sergiu scored, I came, he went back to bed without telling me he hadn’t been wearing a condom, I kept playing for the entire day, I didn’t even feel the cum dripping from my pussy, we won the
division 4 title. I got pregnant.
I vaguely thought about not keeping the baby. I was young, after all, and I didn’t think I would make for a very good mum. But the day my appointment for abortion was the day we first qualified for the national Cup’s quarterfinals. We were still in only in third division back then and the Yeovil Town stadium was packed to its throat, we played Manchester city, sure we lost 5–2 but Sergiu scored a brace and for a moment there they doubted, those Premiere League fuckers, what an earthquake it would have been, so yeah, I missed the appointment and then it was too late. I was so proud of Sergiu, though, he had a marked value of over £1M now, ten times my second best player’s worth, but selling him was out of question.
I actually enjoyed being pregnant, to be honest, I would pretend to feel nauseated and stay at home all day, Satan would cave in to my tiniest cravings and go buy me Snickers in the middle of the night, he was in love with me for some reason, he would get calls from random whores but not even pick up, instead he would rub my swollen feet and bring me herbal tea when I would be fending off contract buyout offers from Real Madrid and PSG and Bayern München, all across Europe they would fight for Sergiu but somehow he would stick with us, David Yeovil against a horde of rich Goliaths.
Even when I wasn’t playing, Sergiu would consume most of my thoughts. I mean, sometimes my mind would wander and I would imagine how good a box-to-box midfielder Anes Mvarac could become should I train him right, or wonder what the issue with Tonton Zoula Moukoko was, he was a terrific goalie on paper but he would always let us down in important matches. All this was nothing compared to my fixation on the Moldovan maestro, though.
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One day I googled his name, I wanted to check whether he was a hot topic among other Football Manager players — how many of us had had the curiosity to parse the cursed Agro Chișinău roster, was I the only one who had found the golden nugget in the pile of manure? I hoped so, I didn’t want to share Sergiu with anyone. But the first result wasn’t a link to some
obscure FM forum.
It was a Wikipedia page, adorned with the picture of a man with a square jaw and long, dark hair that made him look like a contemporary Inca. His skin was olive, his eyes bottomless, his face riddled with acne scars, his low eyebrows gave him the vibe of a serial killer and his thick, fleshy lower lip was all I could see, I wanted to bite that lip and drink the blood pouring from it. Satan entered the room at that moment, I threw my phone away. With a hand on my swollen belly, I asked him what he thought about the name “Sergiu”. He laughed, not sure how else to react. We had the best sex of my life five minutes later.
Then we got promoted to the Premiere League, it only took us five seasons, quite the miracle to be honest, the team had grown around Sergiu, now worth £ 8M, we weren’t the laughing stock anymore, especially with this lean, strong Greek defensive midfield Papadopoulos and Mika Ääritalo as a mighty target man, think whatever you want about Finnish football, 196 cm and 92 kgs are hard to move when it’s time to fight for an incoming cross. Sergiu finished the season Yeovil Town won the Championship with 30+ goals, breaking the club’s record, and then I’m not sure what happened.
I guess I noticed something was a little odd when, one evening, I felt her move. We knew it was a she growing inside my belly, we had seen her fanny at the ultrasound, that appointment I hadn’t missed somehow. Since that day Satan and I had started calling her “the little peanut”, and I’m not sure why, but I liked that idea. Those ideas. I liked the concept of a peanut
germinating inside of me, I liked that Satan would look at me like he was proud of my body being able to arrange a shitton new cells in the correct way, I liked that my boobs grew boobsier, but more than anything else I liked having to soon make room for someone else in my life. When I felt her little foot kick, and pressed gently on my stomach’s skin and sensed her press back, I suddenly wanted for us to have a good time, we just had gotten a sad, goalless draw against Arsenal anyway, I was pissed with this stupid game, so I turned the computer off, headed for the bathroom, poured us a hot bath, sprinkled some scented salt and lit a few candles, and then we had a chat about everything and nothing, peanut and me, and I only very quickly mentioned the third stadium enlargement request I had to send the board because we would never be able to win the Champions League with a meager 17500 seated tickets to sell.
We went through 3 pretty rough season between my 6th and 8th months, finishing in the second half of the table, and even getting very close to being relegated once. My president started applying pressure on me, the sad crooked wrinkled dick, Yeovil Town would still be sharing the pitch with the local girls’ rugby team if it weren’t for me but he didn’t care. He wanted results. So instead of punching him in the face I got my shit together, achieve by unity as the club’s motto says, I had a talk with the boys, changed tactics for a more conservative 4-4–2 with a diamond midfield, traded Alec Slater and John Bowden for a very promising poacher
from France called Pierre Armandi, and fucking won the Premiere League. To be honest, both Liverpool and Chelsea were going through a generational crisis that year and I only beat Man U and C by one point. But still. I had made it, we had made it, even with Sergiu netting a meager (by his standards) 17 goals. Oh, yeah, but he also secured 44 assist, the best figure English pro football had ever seen. And he was now valued at a whooping £132M.
Us winning the league also meant we secured a Champions League ticket. I imagined us snatching the cup for our first participation, reaching our ultimate goal, living the dream. I imagined tears rolling down Sergiu’s cheeks, a man like him didn’t cry much, but surely reaching the biggest achievement he could dream of would touch his heart. I should have been through the moon at this prospect, boiling with anticipation, but somewhere inside of me I could feel I wasn’t, not totally. Maybe I’m just paralysed by what’s at stake, I thought. Maybe I’m tired. I was very much pregnant, after all.
I had a hectic transfer window that summer, I intended to spend every last pound we got from claiming the title into finding the best bargains across the world. We didn’t have much of a choice anyway, as our lacking reputation made all the established hotshots reluctant to sign for Yeovil Town. But I felt like we needed more experienced men, should we conquer Europe, so we signed an ageing Neymar who was stuck on the bench at PSG and — for the first time in his career — he didn’t disappoint. At his contact, 25 years old Sergiu became even better. In December, he snatched the Ballon d’Or, and in March we were qualified for the Champions League’s quarter finals after obliterating a meek Atalanta 8–1 on aggregate.
Our next fixture was a tough one: we had to face Real Madrid, the defending champion. The away match was a nightmare, Ääritalo had to be subbed due to an injury before half time, Neymar being Neymar he had probably been out partying the night before and was nowhere to be found on the pitch, and Sergiu was in a bad day — for the first time ever. We lost 3–0, I almost punched my computer. I then rushed to the second leg, butchering the two interspersed league games with a B team — I didn’t want any of my important players to miss the season’s most important battle. Huish Park was reaching its melting point for the home fixture, all 28500 tickets were sold out and the thin crowd by Champions League standard
screamed their lungs out. Even Vini Jr scoring a volley for Madrid by minute 12 wasn’t enough to shut them up. They knew they could trust Sergiu. I did too. He scored a hat trick that night and delivered 1 assist, bringing the match into extra time. Then I started to feel a lingering pain in my lower abdomen, so I went to the bathroom to check whether my antispasmodic pills were OK to use during pregnancy — they’re not. It started hurting more. “Maybe this is it”, I thought, “I’m having a baby.” And I was scared, but also thrilled, and amazed, and I couldn’t wait so I went to bed thinking maybe I’m gonna wake up in a few hours with the mattress wet from amniotic liquid pocket burst. It was ultimately a false alarm, I woke up late the following day to find out on the computer screen that Yeovil Town had snatched a qualification with a 5–4 win on aggregate after extra time. Sergiu had scored the winner.
The couple days after that were pretty weird. Satan had worked a lot to turn the second room of our tiny apartment into a haven for our child to be, and for an emotionally unstable sex addicted crackhead he had done a pretty decent job. The walls were a pale pink — I’m all for womens’ emancipation but I really love the color — and there were stickers of fluffy animals here and there. A crib stood in the middle, and he had bought a tiny convertible couch for us to crash on during the long sleepless nights that were to be expected. I spent most of my time sitting there, doing nothing, rubbing by belly, feeling the sunrays on my face through the window. It was a wonderful April, and I felt at peace. I barely played a couple hours of Football Manager, but it was still enough for Yeovil Town to beat Paris Saint-Germain in the semifinals. It wasn’t thanks to Sergiu, though, as he inexplicably underperformed, but the team had learned not to rely on him anymore. Of course, as is usual with Paris, a former player of their side caused their demise: Neymar scored a brace in each fixture, bagging us a comfortable win 4–1 on aggregate.
And just like that, here we were. The most important match of my career as a manager was scheduled for June the 2nd, game time. Should we want to carve our names in golden letters on the pantheon of modern football, we’d have to dispose of mighty Man City, and outplay their ogre center forward Erling Haaland. They were 10 points ahead of us in Premier League, and having the form of their life, but I didn’t care about that at all to be honest. The Champion’s league would decide its winners on a single fixture, and as I loaded my save to play the match I was well aware that anything could happen.
Sergiu was nowhere to be found. He wasn’t injured — the man never picked up any injury. He wasn’t missing from training, as that would sometimes happen to players with a low professionalism stat when they were unhappy with their contract. He just… Wasn’t there. Not in the professional team roster, not in the reserve, nowhere. I checked the club transfer history too, in the unlikely event that I had sold him without noticing — nothing there either. I started feeling uneasy, my palms were sweating, my ears were buzzing. Just to be sure, I had a look at the team previous results, only to not understand what was before my eyes. The win 4–1 against PSG was still there, but the quarterfinals was a 1–0 win on aggregate, with Mvarac as a scorer. And all the other fixtures were similar: no sign of Sergiu anywhere. I could now feel my heart beat on my eardrums, and a sharp pain pierce through my abdomen. For a moment, I thought I was having a panic attack.
I was, in fact, having a baby.
I screamed for Satan. He grabbed the emergency bag that was waiting for us in the hallway and we headed downstairs. It was a little over midnight, the night was crystal clear and the air fresh on my forearms. In the distance, the city’s glimmering lights were dancing like a thousand stars, the traffic lights jumping from green to orange to red as if to reassure me with their hypnotic sequences. I took a deep breath and all bad thoughts vanished from my mind. We caught a cab, rushed to the hospital. In between each stab from the contractions I felt calm. Relaxed. Ready.
Alexandra was a very nice baby. She barely screamed as she got out of my womb, and immediately stopped when the nurse handed her over to me. She looked at me and smiled, and curled on my chest like a pink, crumpled cat. She let out the longest sigh I have ever heard, pressed her right cheek on my boobs, immediately fell asleep. At that moment, I got this feeling, it’s impossible to explain really, should anyone have tried to tell me about that
beforehand I would just have laughed in their face, but it was like she was radiating something, like the mere contact of her skin on mine was enough to recreate a network of tiny veins, just enough to let molecules pass from her body to mine — atoms of completeness.
We were moved to my room and started getting to know each other. She would eat on schedule, gain weight, snooze for hours and babble endlessly when she was awake. Satan would take her for walks in the hallway, but never for longer than a couple minutes, as I couldn’t stand us being apart for too long. It took me barely a few hours to forget what life without her had been. It took me my whole time there to think about anything else than her, and me, and how the air in my lungs tasted different now. When Satan told me three days had passed and it was time for us to return home, I didn’t believe him. Yet I also couldn’t wait.
I held Alexandra close against my chest as I waited for Satan to dig into his jacket pockets and fish out the apartment key. I could feel her tiny heart beat with the tip of my fingers. He let us enter before him, I was glad, I couldn’t wait to introduce my daughter to her new home, but I immediately felt something wasn’t right. I didn’t notice the computer right away, I felt the wrongness before I could explain what was wrong, and my first reflex was to hold tighter on my daughter. When Satan realized the damage — the shattered monitor, the bent metal panel on the side of the PC, the weird gooey greenish stuff that had been spilt everywhere on the inside of the machine — his first reflex was to parse every opening of the apartment for signs of tampering. There wasn’t any — we live on the fourth floor, the prospect of someone breaking and entering through a window was super unlikely and the main door was untouched. He closed it behind us and locked it. That’s when Alexandra started crying.
Maybe she had felt the rapidly rising tension — I’ve been told babies can perceive that clearer than sounds or signs. Maybe she was just tired, maybe the trip back home had unsettled her, most probably a little bit of all that, I’m not sure, forgive me, I’m new to this. Anyway, she was crying — really crying — for the first time of her life, and somehow I couldn’t help but feel it was my fault. I tried breastfeeding her, she ate a bit but really she didn’t seem hungry. I changed her napkin, sang songs, softly rocked her, did everything I could. Satan proposed to help but I didn’t feel like giving up on calming Alex myself, I thought it was my purpose, my mission, even if I was awful at it. I thought it was what I lived for. I told him to leave us alone, and I saw on his face that he was hurt, that made me feel bad but not bad enough to make amend. He left towards the kitchen to fix himself a sandwich. After a couple hours, the night fell, and the darkness engulfing us brought Alexandra some peace. She was now asleep, but I still held her
for a while before laying her in her cot, very calmly, very gently. Only then did I notice the silence.
I went out of the room and softly called for Satan, but he didn’t answer. The light in the kitchen was on, the mayonnaise jar open on the counter, but he was nowhere to be seen. The main door was ajar. I’m not sure why I immediately felt compelled to go to the living room window, and look down. I saw him almost right away, although he stood in a dark patch on the pavement across the street from our building. He was talking to someone whose silhouette I could barely distinguish, apart from the long, dark hair. I wonder who this could be, then they started kissing. A passionate kiss, full sexual tension, I could tell even from far away — and it
made me angry. The filthy son of a bitch. The irreversible pig. I walked back to the apartment’s door, locked it and left the key in the hole. Satan would have to find somewhere else to sleep, I didn’t want him anywhere near us, I didn’t want to see him again, ever. Or maybe just one last time, so I got back to the living room only to find out that he was gone. The street was now empty. I started crying.
I’m not sure if I fell asleep or not, but when I opened my eyes a moment later, I was unable to say how much time had passed. Our apartment was now completely in the dark, and the silence had become unbearable. I couldn’t hear a thing — not a single car passing in the street, not the faintest echo of a neighbor’s TV, not even the usual hum of our battered fridge. That
scared the shit out of me. I started walking towards Alexandra’s door. For some reason, it was closed. Did Satan come back? Was he in the room with her? I posed for an instant with my hand on the doorknob, something holding me back, but the dead silence gave me a shove, or maybe it sucked me in, and I opened the door. A ray of moonlight was shining through the
window, bathing the small room in a white, frozen light, making the pink walls seem red. A man was there. He was bent over Alexandra’s cradle, his long hair cascading all around her so that I couldn’t see my little baby. I opened my mouth to scream, but there was no air in my lungs. Very slowly, with his back turned on me, the man stood up. When he turned around, I
noticed two things. First, the shape on the mattress, a shape in the form of a baby’s body, an absence of a presence. Then the blood. On the sheets. On the ground. On the walls. On the man’s shin. On the scars on his face. On his lower lip.
I wanted to bite that lip so hard.
