Peaches

She looks at her fuzzy navel playing peekaboo from under her shirt that used to fit only 6 short months ago. She sighs. She knows how these things work. She knows that sex can lead to this. Her on again, off again boyfriend hadn’t seen her since she first found out she was pregnant.

He conveniently remembered that he was exactly what everyone apparently already knew about him: that he was all talk. He could stumble into a room of strangers and come out with surface level friends, yet called them “friends” nevertheless.

After hearing of her “new predicament”, he was finally at a loss for words. She wasn’t even surprised about him leaving. She was surprised at how silent his leaving was. No fluttery hands to cover up his nerves; no flowery words to save face, just empty eyes and hollow cheeks.

She has since taken to driving to Walmart at 2:00am to satisfy her late night cravings. She wanders the cookie aisles thinking about all the things she is not prepared for. How being a hairdresser does not give enough money or time off to raise a newborn. How her mother wrote her off after hearing of yet “another mistake from [her] own kin”. So, to hide from the looming idea that she will be responsible for another human, she escapes her restless mind to roam the junk food aisles of Walmart.

And on one such a night, waddling through the produce section, she swings a hip a bit farther than she intended into a pyramid of beautifully stacked peaches. They topple over in an instant, right in front of her and her swollen belly. She almost leaves them. She would’ve left in silence too, so as not to draw too much attention. However, she cannot control the urge to see how big of a mess she made, so she looks back. There, in almost the same amount of time it took for the peaches to fall, is a mousy, young wisp of a woman who must’ve sprinted over to restack the fallen produce.

She stares at the peaches scuttling across the floor and then at the frantic woman trying to catch all of them, even the ones rolling all the way to the deli. During this moment, the little human in her belly seems to do a small hiccup.

She looks at the attendant, with her dishwater, blonde hair and sad eyes, trying to clean up the collateral damage from what her pregnant hips had created. She sighs, long and deep. Cradling her hiccuping stomach, she takes a step forward, does her best to squat, grabs a peach off the floor and says in a quiet, reassuring voice, “Here, you missed one.”