Three Minutes
By Charlotte Moberly
She and the test are having a staring competition. They are both sitting on the bathroom floor, she cross-legged in her fraying jeans and green socks, it wearing blue foil packaging, taunting her with its crinkled glint. She inhales deeply, focusing on the air as it fills her throat, behind her chest, the depths of her lungs. She picks up the foil packet. The tiles deliver a cold shock through her thin socks as she stands up. Can’t wait all day.
She turns on the shower so it doesn’t seem odd she’s taking so long, pulling her arm back from the tap before the first rush of jets hit the bathtub and begin drilling their rhythm in her ears. She tears the foil open and pulls out the test. It’s her first time. She reads the instructions, following each step awkwardly – where, here, ok, hand angled uncomfortably, is that enough? Three minutes, it says. Her phone screen glows underneath her fingers as she sets the countdown. Start.
She feels different, somehow, since she’d noticed the absence of that red stain, day after day after day. Like there might really be something more than a smile growing in her stomach. It would be tough, of course. If it were true. Her body rearranging itself for an unrespectful tenant. The head-stomach-pressure of daily nausea – acid in her throat as she even thinks it.
Matt’s whistles carry through the door, each one cutting clean like a holepunch, merging with the rush of the shower in some strange, accelerating folk dance. He will be waving a feather duster around ineffectually, a musical cleaning man. Endearing, really, that he thinks it does anything. He needs help, sometimes, with the basics – cleaning skills, remembering to do his taxes, how to fill in his medical forms. As if no one really taught him how to do life, and while everyone else figured out how to pretend he didn’t quite manage to develop a convincing act. Oh, Matt. The right call not to mention this yet. To pretend she’s just having her shower, same as usual. It’s been such a big part of his picture for them. Their plan. A bit earlier than they thought, sure, but still – a wonderful surprise, he’d say. He’d get ahead of himself, picture teaching the little thing about space, playing with toy dinosaurs. Imagine Sunday mornings watching their sports matches, proudest man on the pitch. No – better she hold the hope for him, for now. She can handle it. Probably.
One twenty-three left. The sweat is beginning to collect on her skin as the steam rises up from the shower. The bathroom is becoming muggy, vaguely hazy, a little too hot now. A whole being, becoming itself inside her? A whole being to keep alive? Asking her with unintelligible wails for God knows what at two in the morning? What if she can’t figure out what it needs?
Everyone finds it tough, though. And don’t they all say it’s worth it? Surely it would be. For that vision Matt has. Family like a department store advert. Autumn walks, board games, Christmas with her mother. Repeating the patterns she watched, the rituals she performed as a child, switching parts. But with that would come the inevitable pickups, drop-offs, the cacophony of school orchestra performances. Laundry. Homework. Screaming, yawning, finally a chance to sleep. Racing between work and pickup and work again to prove she can do it. The modern woman. Matt, never the disciplinarian, never the administrator, swooping in for playtime. No one asking Matt, how do you balance it?
Something builds in the bottom of her chest. The room is too hot, suffocatingly humid. She presses her head against the side of the bathtub, focusing on the cool of the ceramic on her forehead. Is she even capable of doing it, being responsible for a whole person, if she’s capable of thinking this way? Did her mother ever sit on the bathroom floor, thinking herself into it, out of it?
Thirty-four seconds. It inside her even now, maybe. Gnawing at her, asking for more. She swallows, staring at the white plastic face-down on the sink.
Twenty seconds. The plastic stick feels insubstantial, flimsy in her hand, somehow unqualified for the job of messenger. Like it couldn’t possibly hold the weight of the places it could take – has taken – her. Ten seconds now. Matt would be heartbroken if she didn’t – to know she’d even thought she might not – five – no, she can’t think like that – three – it might not even be -
Her phone vibrates on the tiles.
She squeezes her eyes shut for a second, then turns the test over.
Staring at the ink, for a second she’s back to that time they went to that exhibition with the black paintings. Hundreds of rectangles of different sizes, subtly different shades, within a single painting. Matt only able to see a black canvas. Standing there together, hands touching, each unable to comprehend the other’s perception.
Nothing to tell Matt. Everything to tell Matt.
The sudden silence when she shuts the shower off. Then the piercing ring of Matt’s whistling like an alarm.
She knows she can’t put it off much longer. She and the test are having a staring competition, counting the seconds until she opens the door.
THE END
Author Bio: Charlotte Moberly is a writer based in London. Her work has been published in The Kindling, Our Culture, and Thred, among others.