Benighted Read Free

it was just me who was worried, and I only brought you into it to give my worries weight; or I can tell the truth and say, yes, but I know that’s what you were thinking. I’m quite relieved when another contraction starts up and takes away the need to answer.
    My sister toils on the bed. I sit and watch. No doubt she is in great pain, but she was probably right. I can’t get into the spirit of things.
    The doctor returns at intervals. I wonder how she’s affording him: money drips off him instead of sweat. I sit on my plastic chair and let him ignore me.
    Becca lies on the bed and speaks to me once or twice every hour.
    Finally we come to it. I tilt my head around and find that the desired end is coming to pass. Tiny feet appear, then tiny knees, by which time it’s perfectly clear that the infant is going to be a lyco.
    The doctor produces him with a subdued flourish, and there he is: a little baby boy, smeared with fluid and trying his best to move his brand-new limbs in the scalding light. His face is funny-looking, folded over and pressed bright red; he looks like a skinned rabbit. He’s terrified.
    Parkinson picks him up, examines him, puts him through a few moments of tests. Becca’s hands fidget on her chest; I sit very still. “Perfectly sound in every way,” Parkinson finally pronounces, and he hands the little mite over for the nurses to excoriate. The boy’s puckered face contorts as they set to work swabbing him.
    Becca’s face is running with sweat; she’s almost sobbing. “Oh thank God. Oh thank God, oh thank—”
    Then she remembers that her bareback sister is listening.
    “Don’t worry about it,” I say, and shrug. “At least you get to keep him.”
    Another contraction comes along, this one for the afterbirth. I give her my hand and squeeze back as hard as I can. This is to stop her from crushing it altogether. Perhaps it feels like fellowship from the outside.
     
    By the time I get home, I have three separate backaches. I swipe-card my way through the door, get in the elevator, and go all the way up to the seventh floor. The building is a little scuzzy. There are dust mice under the radiators and peeling paint on the windows; when I take a bath, I’ve been known to get bits of plaster in my hair. All of this means that it’s cheap, which means I can afford it. And also, lycos don’t live here, not adult ones anyway. It started out with nons moving in because of the low rent. The apartments are undersize anyway, and lycos prefer to have at least one biggish room for a lock-up. After a while, the lycos moved out because there were too many damn barebacks around, and now it’s pretty much lyco-free. We tend to have lyco children, as the condition’s not inherited, and some of us, a very few of us, marry lycos, but there’s a non in every apartment. This has its advantages, the biggest being that no one acts like I’m about to arrest them.
    I get to my apartment. I’ve painted the rooms red and blue, trying for cozy, but really they’re just small. The bedroom consists of a double bed where I sleep alone, and about an inch of space on each side. The kitchen is narrow, and has some food in it, enough for dinner. I haven’t thought about food for a few hours, so I’m not yet hungry, but I will be in a while; I need to work myself up to it. What I’ve been looking forward to is a hot bath, the first major consolation of the evening.
    My feet hurt. I kick off my scary-lady shoes, and hobble toward this goal. When I open the door, I find that there’s a big wet patch on the ceiling, pouring a narrow stream of gray water down into a minor flood on my bathroom floor.
    This is a disappointment I do not want to have to deal with, but I cannot have a bath with the room in this state. I make my way upstairs, shoeless, and knock on the door of the Cherry family, the people responsible for this misfortune. The kids, I discover—lycos both—are babysitting themselves tonight and have