Anna Lea Jancewicz

(for David (not Lee Roth))

Finally, one afternoon, in a fit of desperation, you fish one of Husband’s plain white undershirts out of the Semi-Clean Pile and with a Sharpie make a custom maternity shirt.

I’m not just getting fatter, ok? There’s another human in here.

Husband says you shouldn’t count your chicken before it’s hatched. And in fact, when folks begin to ask What are you hoping for? You find yourself replying A human. Husband prefers We’re hoping it’ll be Asian. Asian babies are really hip now. He also lets them know, in a confidential tone, that werewolf does run in his family. On my father’s side he whispers, sotto voce. You think this may be true.

Husband proposes naming the baby David Lee Roth, Jr. You make a counter offer. Only if we can go with Anna Lita Ford, should it be a girl. Stalemate.

You love Fern. Also, Opal. Husband decrees: No naming babies after plants or rocks. Why beat around the bush? You may as well name the kid Bongwater. You scowl.

Ulcer Hellhammer, Husband says, beaming. That’s gender neutral. You agree to disagree. What about Agony Hellhammer? he asks. Is that more girly?

This baby will be Irish and Jewish, he says, You know that means it’ll have a tail and horns. You add to the gift registry: lots of little kilts, lots of little hats.

You attend childbirth classes, the kind where the instructor wears a large pendant around her neck that resembles the Venus of Willendorf. She plays tranquil New Age flute music at the end of each session, and urges you to visualize rainbows and waterfalls. Husband elbows you as you both sit cross-legged on the floor and whispers I think I have dog crap on the bottom of my boot. You smell this to be true. You both agree you are out of your element.

You decide to just have the baby in your own bathtub. Your birth plan goes something like: “Play Whole Lotta Love on repeat, very loudly, and yell fuck a lot at the top of my lungs until we see a head.” Amazingly, this works really well, and none of the neighbors call the cops. Husband says Led Zeppelin is for queers and losers. You’re the one who is shitting a broadsword, so he can eat it. But you love him so much more now, somehow.

The baby has no Asian features, of course. And surprisingly, no horns or tail. You do note upon waking, after the first postnatal full moon, that your wee darling is spattered with a fair amount of blood, chicken feathers stuck to rosy cheeks. Ulcer Hellhammer is still the cutest baby you’ve ever seen. It’s true. She really is.

ANNA LEA JANCEWICZ lives in Norfolk, Virginia, where she homeschools her children and haunts the public libraries. If she could fistfight any historical figure, it’d probably be Martin Luther or Herman Melville. Also, she has no familial feelings toward her dog. Her writing has recently appeared at Bartleby Snopes, The Citron Review, Rawboned, Squalorly, and elsewhere. Yes, you CAN say Jancewicz: Yahnt-SEV-ich. More at annajancewicz.wordpress.com

Devin Strauch

She’s in the shower and washing away her old apartment when she finds the first strand of angel hair. It slumps from her scalp, pretending to belong. She rolls it between her fingers and then traces it up, feeling where it connects with her skin. By the time she finds the courage to pluck it from herself, the water is cold and she’s shaking and the pain doesn’t surprise her, but she isn’t quite ready for it. She chews on the soft noodle and wonders if her new boyfriend has a magic apartment or if maybe her body is just changing realities, to one where hair is spaghetti and spaghetti is hair. She worries that maybe she got so lost in her old head and old apartment and old boyfriend that even old lunches have fused to her skin. Mainly though, she wonders if her new boyfriend likes pasta.

Months pass and soon she finds her fingers sneaking through her regular hair to feel the growing mass underneath, like a bowl of brains on Halloween. She worries her boyfriend will find out, so she started cutting it off every morning after he leaves for the day. She slices the thin pasta off, naked and alone in the bathroom. She watches it drop into the toilet and down the drain. Their pipes are starting to clog from the wheat, but her boyfriend already asked why their trash was always full of the odd noodles, so she has no where else to dump the angel hair.

It’s not until she cuts her finger with the blade and instinctively sucks on the wound that she notices her blood is starting to taste less like copper and more like tomatoes. By then their toilet has stopped working, so she’s been cutting her noodles into plastic bowls and hiding them deep in the fridge, past the rotting lettuce and forgotten strawberries.

Her boyfriend loses his job and she’s already lost hers, forever ago before her nail clippings would turn into parmesan cheese.

“We’re fucked,” he says, coming home and opening a beer and slouching on the couch.

“We’ll be okay,” she says.

“How are you going to live? How are we going to eat?”

She wants them both to eat the pasta, her pasta, but she feels it’s something he has to ask of her first, something she can’t offer without him recognizing it, wanting it, demanding it.

“I guess you’re right,” she says, wishing he would bite into her. “We’re fucked.”

DEVIN STRAUCH is a writing undergrad at Metro State University in Denver, graduating Fall ’14. He likes to take apart computers and get lost in rivers.