Uncle Baby

Alex Fabrizio

My father always told the stories—to anyone, to people who were there—of how he and Paul had played with Uncle Baby. Them back from college, eleven years older than Baby—a long lacuna of miscarriages and things unnamed. Uncle Baby, writing sentences at the kitchen table. They played with him at night. Put lines of King’s black turds all down the hall. Set his alarm ahead six hours and watched him pour and eat his Alpha-Bits in the hot Florida dark. Their coup de grâce: the masks. My father was Nixon, Paul a lime-green grimacing mummy. When they knocked on his window, Uncle Baby hid under the covers, so they kept knocking and saying, Baby, Baby, let us in. He recognized their voices. His brothers. So alike their gill-shaped stretch marks curled in the same places on their bellies like a double helix. They couldn’t say how long he screamed when he came to the window—screamed as they screamed with laughter, screamed until Mimi came screaming after them in her fungus-colored bathrobe. I wondered what Baby saw in the dark. A pair of monsters with his brothers’ voice? Or a mask on a face that he knew—and underneath, another face. One he didn’t know, a face he’d never seen.

 

Alex Fabrizio lives in New York, where she is pursuing a PhD in English and comparative literature at Columbia University. She received her MFA in creative writing from Ohio State University. Her chapbook Determinant will be published by Kent State University Press in 2014.

 

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