I am stupid.
I go back inside, shutting the door against the grind of the Stanhopes’ generator.
Sarah is sitting at the table with a cup of instant coffee. We switched to instant after they doubled the tax on imports. I’m touched by the sight of her.
“Thanks for doing that,” I say, ashamed. “It’s not totally convincing, but thank you.”
“Hm?” she says absently. She’s reading the news on her small screen. For her this is as good as it gets. Saturday morning, silence, coffee, screen.
“The ‘plant.’ That you made. For Lulu.”
“UN Considers Proposal to Construct International Landfills in North Pole,” she reads. “Is that good or bad?”
* * *
I open Lulu’s flimsy door and step into her room. I turn off the WaveMachine. She’s sleeping on her back, her arms flung above her head as they were whenever she slept as a baby. Her breathing sounds as good to me as water running in a creek.
Before I slide open the drawer beneath her bed, I already know what I will find hidden in the back corner: the glue, the glitter.
* * *
When Lulu was newborn we called her Muskrat, though neither of us really knows what a muskrat is. It was just that she seemed like a small, mysterious mammal. I remember the way she would arch her tiny eyebrows when I picked her up after she’d finished drinking as much as she could get from Sarah’s nipple. I’d hold her under her arms, in constant fear of dislocating them from her little shoulder sockets, and she’d raise those eyebrows, halfway a queen disapproving of something, halfway an animal startled out of its nest in its moment of deepest respite. I have no photograph of this face Lulu used to make, it was far too fleeting to ever catch, but that face of hers, those eyebrows peaked, imperious, disoriented, that is the face of my life.
How many times did I call Sarah from work to ask, “Is she still breathing?”
* * *
I don’t touch the glue or the glitter. Lulu is awake now. I can feel it, can feel her pretending she’s still asleep. I shut the drawer and leave the room and (what’s this giddiness I feel?) wait for Lulu to come out, whenever she’s ready. The thing is, the organism survives no matter what; the organism even thrives.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
HELEN PHILLIPS is the recipient of a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writer’s Award and the Italo Calvino Prize, among others. She is the author of the widely acclaimed novel The Beautiful Bureaucrat (a New York Times Notable Book) and the collection And Yet They Were Happy (named a notable book by the Story Prize). Her work has appeared on Selected Shorts and in Tin House, Electric Literature, and The New York Times. An assistant professor of creative writing at Brooklyn College, she lives in Brooklyn with her husband and children. You can sign up for email updates here.
