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enjoy this writing from Kyle Hemmings in the free 6" x 9" 2017 PDF file chapbook: Scream (click on the front cover image or the title text to download the free PDF file)				You can also order this as a 2017 6" x 9" perfect-bound paperback ISBN# book! Click on the book cover or this title to get Scream as a book at any time!

Blue Baby

Kyle Hemmings

    Hermie & I were babysitting for old man, Henley. He had won custody of his daughter’s baby after it was discovered that she abandoned it to score drugs. She even denied making it with a guy whose name she couldn’t recall. The old man told Hermie’s mom, always in that deep scratchy voice of his, that she loved to drop acid and that’s what destroyed her, made her see all kinds of colors where there was only black & white. Later, she moved out to join a commune & no one heard from her since.
    The old man himself was becoming increasingly forgetful, searching for keys, for spare parts for his truck that he had already used, for the wife who had died a month before. Perhaps he thought of still sleeping beside her as his thoughts leaked out, random & fragmented.
    One night, while the baby slept, Hermie & I explored the old man’s basement, lights off, guessed our steps with eyes closed. Hermie said that it would help to sharpen our senses. She said it was more fun trying to name the objects we’d touch if we couldn’t see them. A form of sex.
    Even in our teens, Hermie was always curious about death, how many ways one could die, the varieties of self-inflictions, self-negations. With her father gone, her and her mom rarely talked. We ran our hands over what we pronounced as old wooden horses, ones the old man carved himself, old tires that could have used as swings when the old man was young, maybe right out of a Norman Rockwell painting. We traced the edges of hack & circular saws, imagining the drop of blood from our fingers leaving a trace on the cracked concrete floor. We bumped into work benches & old motors no longer salvageable.
    Then, we started to explore each other’s parts, the way we did with eyes open under a moon-licked field. We explored the parts that rarely became exposed. We dug deeper & deeper until one of us sighed in pure pleasure or a pleasurable agony for more.
    Then, Hermie covered my mouth with the soft palm of her hand. She said, Listen. She said she could hear a baby cry. I listened but heard nothing. That night, after we trudged upstairs, exhausted from feeling too many secret places we’d never own up to, we found the baby face down, not breathing. For years, Hermie insists that we made that baby. I keep denying it.

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