DEVELOPMENT
She was holding the baby incorrectly. It looked gassy. Don’t hold it that way, someone should have said. It? she might have asked. Last year she lightly closed the refrigerator door on her protruding abdomen. Gorillas and chimps seem to manage, but she required instruction: websites, books, seminars. She tried to carry two or more babies at a time, once. She was hyperopic. To her credit, she stopped wearing a baby sling after taking a tumble. Her baby gained head and neck control, grew to guttersnipe, to youth, to taxpayer. It turned out fine.
Brooks Sterritt once engaged in skootsheeting from a bathyscape. He is pursuing an MFA at Emerson College in Boston, where he is the assistant fiction editor of Redivider and a fiction reader for Ploughshares. His writing has appeared in Word Riot, Dogzplot, Rain Taxi, and elsewhere.
