March Flash Tale #2 - "Refusing"

Blowing Rock, North Carolina

This is not supposed to be how it all went down.

We had a plan, Jenny and me. We were ready to go. Because even though I grew up in Bowling Green, even though I’ve been surrounded by the Crazy Idea all my life, I know it’s toxic. I know it’s twisted.

Jenny knows it too.

Knew it?

We were ready to go.

“Sweet girl!” Jenny says, waking me up with a voice so sugary that my teeth hurt. “Sweet Bree!”

I shake my head. It’s feels as though I have a thick comforter between my ears, but I still know the truth.

“Jenny,” I whisper, not trusting my tongue and lips to cooperate. They do; my diction is clear. And so, I raise my voice. “Jenny.”

My wife looks down at me, and her expression changes. Falters. Just a little, just a moment. Before it falls back to the bright-eyed, beaming face of a few moments ago. Like the mask almost fell, and then she put it on again.

Her mommy mask.

It was the face I saw first, as soon as I opened my bleary, drugged eyes. And then I saw my wife’s yellow sundress, I saw her red hair arranged in a style she never would have chosen before today.

My wife beams at me. “Sissy hungry?” she asks. “Sissy want her bottle?” She nods encouragingly, her pigtails jiggling.

I sit up. I’m wearing the frilliest of baby dresses, I am adorned with pink shimmers. I can feel the thickness of a diaper around my waist. And we are in the nursery, the room where we had plans for a real baby, one we made ourselves, and one where we would raise the right way. The normal way.

“It’s not too late,” I say. I reach out my hands and Jenny squeezes them in her own.

And what’s most horrifying is not that she disagrees, but that she doesn’t hear me.

“Chatty Jenny,” she says indulgently. “What a chatty baby!” As if nonsense had come out of my mouth. And in this moment, I have to wonder; are my words just in my head? Do they turn into toddlers’ gibberish as soon as they leave my mouth?

“We can fix this,” I say. I look around the nursery. It’s set up for an adult-sized baby. It’s all set up for me. And I know how this will work in Blowing Rock. While I was unconscious, while I was being fed drugs that would render me incognizant, the leaders would have changed our home. A nursery for me, and a little girl’s bedroom for my wife.

My feminist, proudly independent wife.

But the thing is, I don’t feel like a baby. So, it’s really not too late. Maybe a glitch in the medication or the treatment. I can feel the clumsiness; a twitchiness in my arms and legs, a sense that I may just fall backwards if Jenny let’s go of my hands.

“Let’s get changed,” I say. I kick my feet. “It’ll help. We’ll feel more like us.”

And then what? The leaders will have chosen a woman to be our mother. Mommy. The name makes my heart thud in my chest, my bladder feels heavy and tight. So, perhaps my mind is changed after all.

But I keep going. If I don’t, I’ll be using my diaper for real in a matter of minutes. And the words that seem to make sense, at least in my head, will fade away. Everything will fade, except for…

Mommy.

I shake my head. It doesn’t clear my thoughts; it just sends me off balance. I fall onto my back, arms and legs in the air. Jenny giggles, flops down beside me, and she continues to beam.

“Silly baby,” she coos. “Silly girl!”

How can she have lost her personality in a matter of minutes, how has she gotten so lost?

“Remember your life,” I say as we lie there, side by side. Man and wife. Sisters. “You’re the own who put me straight on all. You’re the one who persuaded me that we had to leave.”

She looks at me. Gazing adoringly. She doesn’t hear a word I say. And I remember something one of my high school buddies said, before we graduated, before I found Jenny, and a marriage of equals, and we both understood that the best future for our family was far away from Blowing Rock.

“The harder they are, the easier they fall,” he said. And he knew; his own father worked on the mind-reprogramming team. The clean-up crew, he called it. With a laugh, with a rueful shake of his head. As it to say, those silly women who want something more than idiotic innocence. And those weak men who believe that Blowing Rock isn’t perfect, isn’t a piece of God’s Heaven right here on Earth, just the way it is.

I reach for my wife’s hand again, but she treats it like a game, giggling and raising her hands out of reach.

And I manage to feel angry, despite the cladding in my head. Despite the heaviest and coziest of mental comforters. “Jenny, you got to think! You’re not my sister, we’re not kids. I refused to do this, we were ready to go and make a real life!”

The falter. I know her well enough. I know my wife. The merest crack in her smile, those beautiful eyes lose their sparkle.

For a moment.

Does she see me as Brian, not Bree? Does she remember?

“Don’t let them win,” I say in an urgent whisper. Or at least, I think I do.

She pouts, new expression for Jenny. The face of a little girl who’s not getting her way.

“Jenny, please, we can get changed and go.” I’m ready to sit up again, I’ve got enough in me.  I doubt I can drive, but maybe she can. If we can just change of out of these crazy outfits, get outside, breathe the fresh air.

Who knows? Maybe that would be enough to free us.

But Jenny isn’t in the fresh air. She’s in her yellow sundress that is styled for a little girl with puffy sleeves and floral hem. She’s wearing her beautiful hair in childish pigtails.

She reaches does and tickles my feet.

“Grumpy Bree,” she says, her expression filled with mischief. “Grumpy girl!”

I lift my head, looking down with wide eyes, bringing up my knees, curling up in protest even as the finest of thoughts leave my head.

Even as I start to giggle.

“There’s that smile,” says Jenny brightly, looking at me with such love and affection that I hardly resist as my lifelong, hard won knowledge leaks from my mind.

She keeps tickling my feet, my silly baby feet.

And I squeal. I shriek and babble. And I love her. I love my big sister forever.

Sissy’s face looms over me, she holds me close and then she tickles my tummy until I’m nothing but laughter. Nothing but gibberish and giggles. And the warm, wet diaper feels normal, Sissy’s pigtails tickling my face is my world.

And then I hear another voice. The other part of our world, calling from downstairs.

“Girls! Breakfast!”

We both turn our heads, breathless and shiny-eyed.

“Jenny, bring your sister. We’re having pancakes.”

Jenny grins at me. Because life is easy now, everything’s simple. I smile back, my mind empty and ready to be filled with love and goodness.

We get to our feet, Jenny takes my hand, and we go downstairs to find Mommy.

THE END

A Blowing Rock man refuses to regress his feminist wife. Perhaps he will be more agreeable as her baby sister. - Rick