Mialise Carney
They found Baby Mickey in a stroller behind the apartment block, right up against the big gray electrical box in the hot sun. It would have made sense to find a baby like Mickey in a stroller, except he was all in pieces and black trash bags. Tied in big knots, Uncle Sheriff said, painting a picture like he does, one hand in the air and the other resting on his holstered gun. Tied in big knots but not tight enough to keep away the flies.
I was thirteen so I didn’t care about most things, not even a dead baby who I’d once held, made his long alien hands clap together, and put my fingers over both of his nostrils when he was sleeping, only for a second or two, just to see. When I didn’t cry about the news, Mom said I was just like Great Grandma Jo who didn’t have much to say about World War Two even though she’d technically lived through it. When we read her girlhood journals after she died, it was all those important dates they made us memorize in school followed by long paragraphs about how mean her brother was or how she was saving up for pink lipstick to impress who would become Great Grandpa Joe (with an E). Kind of made me wonder what big thing might be passing through me unnoticed as neutrinos, ghost particles. Made me think about where I put my ears and my eyes.
Baby Mickey hadn’t been missing until he’d turned up disassembled in the nicely knotted trash bags, but his mom, my Niece-Aunty Jean, went missing afterwards. I’d always liked her name, Jean, like the expensive canvasy blue kind you can get ripped or bedazzled, sometimes imagined slipping inside her skin and walking around in her nice long legs. I called her Niece-Aunty because she was technically my niece but was eight years older than me, so it didn’t seem right, all that linearity of time forced to double back on itself. I wanted our line straight and easy to follow, kind of like the line we formed during those days after Mickey, in the fields around our town whacking the tall dry grass down with pink field hockey sticks, searching for the trash bags with Jean in it.
Nobody was surprised to find a second collection of trash bags, but everybody was surprised when it wasn’t Jean inside but her boyfriend, Geoff. I hadn’t liked Geoff, who can care about a guy with a name that tastes somewhere between a growl and a cough, so I was impressed when I heard over lunch with Uncle Sheriff how many pieces she’d gotten him into, how tight the knots.
Uncle Sheriff’s second wife, Jess, said it was no surprise what befell them the way they acted like they were better than the rest of us, Geoff with his anger management problems and Niece-Aunty Jean with her ambitions. She was always telling us that when she got better SAT scores and the money, she wanted to go off to be a cosmologist, but because she was a girl from our part of the world, everyone thought she was saying cosmetologist, like being pretty was all a girl was good for. Niece-Aunty Jean used to babysit me even when I wasn’t a baby anymore and make me watch Nova documentaries about black holes, ice planets, moons made entirely of diamonds. The universe out there moving in ways we’d never see felt too big and consequential, so the whole time I’d sigh like I was bored instead of scared and ask why she couldn’t just braid my hair and dress me up like normal babysitters.
I’m not gonna be like them, I’m gonna get out of this place, she’d say, eyes reflecting a showering of tv stars, and until she took off with Geoff I didn’t know if she meant my mom’s house, or the town, or the planet. Once she’d got pregnant with Mickey, she and Geoff moved to an apartment at the edge of town, blacked out the windows, stopped answering phone calls or attending wakes, I thought I’d got my answer. I liked Jean because I felt like she had her fingers deep in the timeline, but after Mickey, I wasn’t so sure. It seemed like by trying to escape her nature she just ended up somewhere worse.
Niece-Aunty Jean messaged me a couple days after the funerals. I’d wanted open caskets, as if I had a say, because although I was thirteen and three-fourths, my interest in dead things had crept back inside, and I had a feeling only I would notice if they hadn’t pieced Geoff and Mickey all back together right. Even though I didn’t like Geoff, who used to slime his hand up the back of my track & field t-shirt when I sat beside him at the Outback Steak House even when he knew Jean was looking, I liked Mickey and didn’t want him to turn up to heaven with his feet on backwards, with his shoulder blades like angel wings pinned the wrong way round.
When I asked to see them, Mom pinched the thin skin on the inside of my thigh so hard my nose ran, but Uncle Sheriff said he’d show me some classified pictures later if I thought I could handle it. Sure, I said, I’m thirteen. I can handle anything.
“I need ur help,” Niece-Aunty Jean wrote when I asked her how she’d been, where she was, what’d she been up to. “I need money. You need to go to walgreens, buy 10 google play gift cards for 100 each. Send me thr codes on the back wen done.”
I didn’t know who Jean thought I was, but I was glad she had messaged me. I felt like we had a special connection from the baby-sitting days, and being so close to the murders had made me very popular at school. I’d started selling classified information to the weird and popular girls for Snapchat streaks and cereal flavored Chapstick, even though I was making most of it up using what my teacher called my “unfortunately vivid imagination.”
“ok but u hv to answr a few of my qs,” I wrote.
“Do it right now, i have your mom, ill kill your mom,” she wrote back.
Mom sat right across from me on the back steps, painting her toenails a glossy black; she’d sworn off the usual coral pinks. Otherwise, people would talk if they saw them peeking cheerful from her flipflops in the Costco line. In the grand scheme of things, I wouldn’t have minded so much. I’d been thinking about killing my mom a lot then. Not in the pieces kind of way, in the car crash orphanage way, where she’d basically just disappear and then I’d be left pitiful and interesting and something worth caring about.
I told Jean I would have to see her face first on a skype call, but then she sent all these threats, my address, my IP, so I knew it wasn’t the real Jean but probably a Russian scammer or maybe one of my friends trying to get a rise out of me, since my mom had let me wear a belly shirt to school which got all the boys looking, while their parents still wouldn’t let them wear even a little shimmery eyeshadow.
When they finally caught Jean for stealing baby formula three states away, I was only a little interested. I was fifteen and a half by then, so I was too busy trying to get boys to look at me than to keep up with all of that. By then, it was the sad heavy part any way, the mystery unshrouded—collect calls, lawyers, and debt. Mom crying in the dark kitchen when they shut our power off; jail, trial, settlement, a forever time at a women’s psychiatric prison three hours away from where we lived so nobody could afford to see her even if they wanted to.
I only visited once, when I was seventeen and two-thirds, when I had my own baby, Jordyn, in a heavy plastic carrier knocking a bruise into my hip. I wasn’t sure how Jordyn was related to Jean, if she was a niece or a cousin or a sister or something else entirely. I’d gone with Mom because I wanted to ask her how she could have done it, what got her there, how I’d know when I was close, but she mostly blinked a lot, sucked the Starbursts I’d brought her, and hummed. On the drive back, Mom saw I was disappointed I hadn’t gotten any answers, and reassured me that’s how it was, that’s just how things went. I was almost an adult, I had to learn that now, I had to understand.
Yeah, I thought, pressing the soft tip of Jordyn’s nose down with my black painted fingernail so her nostrils shut entirely, her whole face closing like Mickey’s looked in those classified pictures. Her eyes and wet mouth popped opened to start screaming like she does. My stomach sank because no matter what I did, I’d never be able to stop all the neutrinos from entering her body, all our ghosts.
Mialise Carney’s stories and essays have appeared in swamp pink, Mid-American Review, Fugue, The Washington Square Review, and other places. She is a PhD student in creative writing at the University of Cincinnati, where she reads for The Cincinnati Review and teaches writing. Read more of her work at www.mialisecarney.com
Photo by Yuriy Vertikov on Unsplash
