We find the alive baby behind the schoolyard fence. We say the alive baby because they found a dead one last week in somebody’s garbage can, it was on television, the garbage man saying he thought it was a doll at first, saying doll hands. Our parents say girls who throw babies in garbage cans are bad girls. Our parents say they arrested the girl who lived in the house there. They didn’t show it on television like the garbage man interview, but we imagine it anyway, the girl coming out with handcuffs on her twig arms, in leggings that are bundling at the bottom, grim-faced police on either side of her, disappointed parents wringing their hands behind. We wish we knew the girl from the house so we could ask her why, ask how did it feel, so we could visit her in prison, slip her notes through the bars, we are for you, we are on your side.

We find the alive baby behind the schoolyard fence and we think, like the garbage man, about doll hands and doll parts, until the alive baby makes a little baby noise, until the alive baby makes a little baby movement, and we dig it half-buried out of the dirt and leaves. All of our hands, digging the alive baby out of the dirt, and we think it is less like the alive baby has been buried, more like covered, more like tucked in.

And we don’t hold the alive baby, not yet, afraid of that kind of power, our stomachs stinging with the fear of it, that kind of responsibility, afraid of the mewling in the alive baby’s throat. We think of the baby dolls we had as children (barely days ago we were still children) that would cry if you squeezed them hard enough, and how we grew tired of the squeezing and threw them on the ground instead, tromping on their little doll bellies till the crying sound became a slow wheeze.

And we finally lift the alive baby in our hands, in all our hands at once so none of us has to bear that weight alone, not yet, we whisper to each other, not yet, and wipe dirt away from the alive baby’s pursing little mouth, and one of us goes running to the school for a teacher, for an adult, and we watch her go and think how free she looks, and how light.

Cathy Ulrich is the founding editor of Milk Candy Review, a journal of flash fiction. Her work has been published in various journals, including Black Warrior Review, Passages North, and Wigleaf and can be found in Best Microfiction 2019, Best Small Fictions 2019 and Wigleaf‘s Top 50 Very Short Fictions 2017 and 2019. She is the author of the flash fiction collection Ghosts of You (Okay Donkey Press, 2019). She lives in Montana with her daughter and various small animals.