Emily Rinkema- Fiction

Tiny Little Babies

My sister Sarah texts me our secret emoji code–squirrel, Portuguese flag, martini glass–which means no questions, I need you now. We’ve only used this once, when Mom showed up at my apartment with a bottle of bottom shelf gin and a male hooker named Jeff, although, it turns out, that wasn’t his real name.

Sarah meets me at the door in a robe. It looks like she’s coming off a bender or a breakup or a Grey’s Anatomy marathon. Her eyes are red and puffy. She pulls me inside, locks the door behind me. 

“I have babies,” she whispers, and for a second I think she said rabies, or scabies, which she got once in college from sleeping with a guy actually named Jeff. She knew it was a bad idea but couldn’t resist because he had a British accent. She’s staring at me, waiting for a reaction.

“Babies?” 

“They’re sleeping.” 

In the kitchen, the lights over the island are turned low, and I lean forward and squint to make sense of what I’m looking at. There are three casserole dishes, each with a dish towel in the bottom, and inside, lined up like gnocchi, are babies. Dozens of tiny babies.

I back against the wall. “Are you cooking tiny babies?”

“No!” Sarah says. “OhmyGodohmyGodohmyGodno. I just didn’t know what to do with them. I needed something with sides.” 

I step towards them, then again, and then I’m leaning over the island, Sarah beside me. The babies are no bigger than the tips of my fingers. They have tiny little torsos and tiny little arms and tiny little legs and stupidly tiny little fingers. Most are on their backs, but a few have rolled onto their bellies. I have so many questions that they can’t form in my head before more begin, and they stack up between my brain and my lips.

“How many?”

“Seventy-two.”

“Fuck.”

“Yeah.”

“Wine?”

“I feel like I shouldn’t drink,” she says, but she’s already getting two glasses out of the cupboard. “I mean, I’m a mother now.” We both laugh.

The babies feel oddly unbreakable. Sarah hands them to me one at a time and I rinse them in the sink and place them on a fresh towel on the counter. I’ve always wanted to be an aunt, but never thought I would be. We swore to each other we wouldn’t have children. Too many ways to fuck them up, too many fucked up people in the world already. 

Some babies squirm and make high-pitched squeaks when I take them from Sarah, but others just look in my general direction and open and close their mouths like guppies. 

“Have you called Mom?” I bring a baby to my face so I can examine it. It reaches its hand out and touches the tip of my nose. I have an urge to pop it in my mouth to keep it warm.

“Why would I call Mom?” She says, and then, “Jules, don’t you dare put my baby in your mouth.”

“To tell her she’s a grandma. To a shitload of babies.” I set the baby down next to its siblings.

“Seventy-two,” Sarah says. 

“Sea turtles have lots of babies,” I say. We went to a sanctuary when we were little. A man in a turtle hat told us facts. I remember now that one of those facts is that only one in a thousand sea turtles survive to adulthood. 

“Maybe she’ll be a good grandma,” I say. “I’ve read about people who suck at mothering and then, bam! Turn it all around when their baby has babies.” 

Sarah hands me the last of the babies and I carefully pinch it between my thumb and forefinger and hold it in front of her. “Mama,” I say in a high-pitched voice. “Feed me!” 

“That’s not how they talk.” And then, “Oh fuck. How am I going to feed them?” She looks at her breasts, which are not swollen with milk. “And what about diapers? They don’t make diapers this size. Diapers come in really particular sizes, which is great, but they don’t come this small.” She starts pacing. “They come in normal sizes, don’t they? Like Newborn and then maybe 3-Month old.” 

She’s about to have a panic attack. The first one happened when Sarah was ten and I was eight and Mom had been gone for two days, the longest she’d ever left us alone, and Sarah was making us sandwiches, but there was no more peanut butter, and she started walking back and forth between the table and the counter and thinking out loud, listing things we didn’t have, things that were not in the refrigerator, that we would not be able to eat. And then she leaned against the fridge with her arms wrapped around herself and slid to the floor, and she wouldn’t talk to me or look at me, even when I kicked her, so I just curled up next to her until I got scared enough to call the neighbor who called the cops who broke down the apartment door because I wouldn’t leave Sarah’s side to let them in. 

I set the last baby down on the counter and grab Sarah by both shoulders. I shake her. She stops pacing. “What do we do?” She asks. 

I tell Sarah to put the babies back in the casserole dishes, which have fresh towels in the bottom. I go to her supply cabinet and pull out everything we’ll need: colored pens, post-it notes in three sizes, index cards, 11x17 paper, a ruler, tape. I can hear Sarah singing to the babies and I wonder where she learned the words to a lullaby. It’s strange, sometimes, to realize that we have separate lives, that there are secrets, or at the very least, things we don’t know about each other.

“Wait a minute,” I yell as I lay out the supplies on the dining room table. “Who the fuck is the father? Or is it fathers, you slut,” I say, as she comes into the room. 

“Grow up,” she says. “Why do you have to make everything a joke?”

“Why do you have to be such a bitch?”

“Maybe because one of us has to be responsible,” she says, and here we go, a familiar fight, one where we trot out our competing narratives about who took care of whom, who sacrificed the most, who had to be a parent. “You have no idea,” she starts, but I can tell she doesn’t have it in her today, that she’s too tired to be self-righteous.

“Okay, Mom,” I say. I can’t help myself. Maybe she’s right about me.

“Fuck you,” she says. She grabs the green marker off the table and hands me a stack of sticky notes.

When our How to Keep Tiny Babies Alive lists are finished and taped up on the wall next to the old landline phone, we move into the living room. Sarah has set the casserole dishes on the coffee table and she tells me to strip and lie down on the floor. 

“They need skin to skin contact,” she says, which I tell her is a good mother thing to say. I take my shirt off and lie on my back. Sarah starts placing babies on my belly, warm little pinches of dough. My stomach growls. The babies purr.

“I don’t think I can do this,” Sarah says, taking off her robe and lying beside me. She reaches into the last casserole dish and scoops out a handful of babies, placing them on her skin. “What if I can’t keep them alive?”

“Babies are resilient,” I say, rubbing the scar on my wrist. “Just don’t eat one by mistake. And maybe don’t let the cat in tonight.” 

Sarah reaches her foot so that our toes are touching. We used to do this when we were scared in the middle of the night, a reminder we weren’t alone.  

“You’re going to be a great auntie,” she says, and then, more quietly, “It’s all going to be okay, isn’t it?” 

“Absolutely,” I say. My skin itches, but I don’t move.

“Then tomorrow we’ll name them,” Sarah whispers.

Emily Rinkema lives and writes in northern Vermont, USA. Her writing has been selected for the Wigleaf Top 50, Best Short Fictions, and the Best American Nonrequired Reading anthology, and has appeared in journals such as Vestal Review, JAKE, Flash Frog, and SmokeLong Quarterly. You can read her work at https://www.emilyrinkema.com/ or follow her on X, BS, or IG (@emilyrinkema).