Page 43 - North Star Literary & Art Magazine

front of her was silent. It was pale as one of those porcelain dolls that one might admire through the glass of a curio. The child’s eyes were closed, lost in sleep, not even fluttering to
blink.
She no longer cared about the glass house. This sight disturbed her greatly. “How old?” She asked.
“A year in just a few days,” the woman hummed.
She was astonished.
How was that? The child was so small. Too small, in fact.
Something must have been wrong. This had to be why they never left their home.
They probably couldn’t. Not with a sick child needing their care.
Now she felt bad that she wasn’t at their door offering them help and Bundt cakes
with the rest of the neighborhood. All the woman had asked for was some help with a dying plant and she had the audacity to find her neighbor’s lives amusing.
How awful—and what a nice couple they were. They didn’t deserve the sadnesses of caring for a sick child, or god forbid, the loss.
She wanted to see if she could help in some way, but she didn’t know how, so she looked at the two of them, their bright smiles sparkling. Then she opened her mouth.
“I’m terribly ashamed to ask, but—the child—are they ill?”
The man’s smile faded, and the woman only shot her an accusatory glance.
“No! Of course not! Our perfect baby is as healthy as can be. Why would you say that?” Well, why would she say that?
She stood there, dumbfounded, understanding that she had clearly upset them. She
had forgotten her manners, and it was time to go home. The cup of water would have to wait. She hadn’t even put dinner on the stove yet.
The man crossed the room at an alarming pace, over to the door, in case she had not already seen it, and showed her out. She hurriedly left the glass house and went back to her own where she went about her evening activities, except this time, she was deep in thought.
A furious worry began to build in her chest. Something was wrong with that child. She just knew it.
The thought pounded in her head, never leaving her alone for a minute’s peace.
It was always worse at night when she was restless. It made her feet sweat and her knee ache.
There wasn’t a day that passed where she wasn’t thinking about it.
She started pacing her house, spiraling into some kind of nervous wreck.
They must know there’s something wrong with that child. Don’t they?
Were they just lying to her? Were they really that oblivious?
Or was this all just her imagination?
She went around and around with those questions. Hoping maybe she was wrong.
She didn’t like being wrong—especially when her husband told her she was wrong—but for the first time in her life, she wished he would jump out of his grave in Glasgow, Kentucky and make his way to her house just to bust in the door and tell her she was wrong, right to her face.
But then, lots of time passed.
She thought that adopting a little shih tzu would put an end to her anxieties, and it did for a
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