• Safety seat
    If there’s one thing I hate more than my fiancés time of the month, than it would be shopping for something that I only had the vaguest image of in my head. Especially something as complicated as a safety seat for my soon-to-be-born boy.
    My fiancé had already bought all the bottles, formula, and diapers we’d need to survive the third world war (Although it probably cost us a second mortgage.) Now If only I could find something that might restrain my boy from throwing his own feces, or picking tiny creatures from my hair and devouring them with the gusto of a sailor’s vulgarity, then it would be a mission accomplished for me.
    I searched for a good fifteen minutes, but found nothing along the lines of a strait jacket. I opened up my phone to tell my fiancé to bring the car around so I wouldn’t have to run through the rain. After a quick hormonal rant about the baby shower, she explained how she needed to buy something from somewhere—I wasn’t listening. I was busy trying not to drop the baby seat, which was gradually sliding out of my grasp. I juggled the phone around in my hands before finally stuffing it into my pocket.
    “Ryan?” I stopped. Someone calling my name? In a department store for babies? With the kind of people I hang out with on a daily basis, that just doesn’t seem possible. That voice… It was hard to discern through the disgruntled parents screaming at their fallen little Angel—but— when she called my name again, I was sure that it was her. The voice belonged to the same girl who laughed whenever I told a bad joke. The same girl who agreed with our plans, and then was the same girl that vented on me when her parents wouldn’t let her leave with me all those years ago.
    I turned to see my ex-girlfriend of six years standing before me with a shopping cart stocked with an excellent pink safety seat. She’s always had fair skin, but the pigment that painted her expression wasn’t fair. It was pallid, drained and shocked with eyebrows crunched together and lips open, as if she was going to object to something—but didn’t.
    “Marlow?” She may have had the same voice, but I tried my best to change the sound of my voice over those three years since we stopped talking. No matter how much I tried to change it, mine was still the voice that told her that it wouldn’t work out. It was my voice that lied to her and told her I didn’t want to get married—and it was, of course, my voice that told her I didn’t want children with her.
    She never responded, and the wall created between us from the silence was growing more palpable with every hushed second. The gears of our eyes were jammed together and we weren’t standing in the pacifier/baby wipe section of Babies R Us, we were back in High School, holding each other under the stone steps on the west wing of the school. We were back to our first kiss leaning against the limbs of the tree in her front yard. She was completely back. I could only have one foot in the past; my other foot had to be dug into the desert of reality. It was because I’d gained the weight of a soon-to-be baby boy, and a demanding fiancé. It was because I was ensnared in the cage of engagement.
    I felt her look into my eyes—into me. Then I saw her look at her cart full of baby toiletries and accessories. She didn’t look back up at me, and with a turn of her heel and the squeak of her cart she left me.

    By the time my fiancé pulled the car around to the front of the store, my shirt was sucking on my chest, and I was situated atop the newly boxed safety seat.