The Surrogate by Sara Kaplan-Cunningham

Today, Carol is glum. I bring her a hot coffee from the machine, two creams one sugar.

“What’s wrong, queen?” I ask. We have this kind of relationship, ascribing to each other royal titles we haven’t earned.

“Birds are cowards,” she says. Her face is backlit by the square window that overlooks the playground. She paws at her keyboard half-heartedly. 

“Not sure I agree,” I say.

“You don’t think bugs are braver?” she asks.

We used to have a cockroach problem. Both of us in denial until one skittered across my chest last summer, petite and thunderous as a heart murmur. Carol told me later it was bright red, the length of a cigarette.

“Maybe bees,” I say. “You know, their whole sacrificial thing. The ‘I’ll die for the good of the hive,’ mentality.”

“But a bee isn’t a bug,” she says.

The bell rings. It’s recess. We rise from our desks to go stand at the window, watch the trail of children descend upon the slides and line up for the monkey bars. Plump red hands grasp at each other’s backpacks and jackets. Rays of nonsense pierce through the canopy of chatter: “you’re more than a baby,” “my mom’s apple juice!”

When we return to our desks, Carol’s mood is no better. My boyfriend detests her. Her skin is oily, pins of dirt dot her nose, and she wears her hair in a skinny ponytail that curls out of the base of her head.

“It’s like she doesn’t even try,” he’d observed at last year’s staff holiday party.

“She brings this depressive musk,” he’d said at my nephew’s bris.

Carol and I have worked together for four years. She started off as my boss, but now we share the office manager position. Every morning, we restock the coffee in the teachers’ lounge together. We divide the role’s responsibilities in half.

“Why are you thinking about birds?” I ask her.

“I was more so thinking about bugs,” she says. “Drosophila melanogaster—or the fruit fly—specifically. They don’t make any effort to avoid us.”

“Sometimes, they even fly right into your eye.”

“And die,” she says. Her eyelids droop. “Kamikaze-style.”

We return to our tasks. I’m emailing parents on the waitlist. Carol’s doing hell-if-I-god-knows-what. She’s not great at time-and-task-management. I often catch her watching It’s a Wonderful Life or How to Train Your Dragon, the two movies uploaded to the school’s Cloud, instead of ordering supplies or reaching out to prospective families.

“They sent me a holiday card,” Carol says suddenly. “Joanie’s parents.” I stop typing. “The rim was decorated in these wreaths and bowls of fruit. But there were Menorahs, too. There were even little fruit flies, with those dotted lines to show they’re flying.” Her head slumps into her hands.

“That’s cruel,” I say. “Is it even legal to contact someone you’ve, like, restrained against?”

She shrugs. “Restraining order’s expired.”

“How old is she now?”

“Eight,” Carol says. “Eight years since she bust up my uterus”

Carol and I see the same therapist, Dr. Anis. Carol began seeing her through court-mandate, then recommended her to me when, a few years ago, my boyfriend moved out of our shared apartment and back in with his parents. He said it was to save money. We almost didn’t make it through.

 “You’ve done everything they asked,” I say.

“They didn’t ask me to abduct their baby,” she says.

“‘Abduct’ is harsh.”

“Filch their baby.”

“What would Dr. Anis say?”

“Something something hormones. Something something psychosis.”

“You grew her,” I say. “The body keeps the score.”

Carol sucks her teeth and sighs. “More like ‘the snore.’”

The children are returning. Their cheeks glinting like glazed cherries. Their chatter is compressed, a distant swarm. All their nonsense contained. Carol and I are already at the window, waiting. A light blue jacket breaks off from the group. The others surge on, the teachers hovering over their bobbing heads.

“What’s he doing?” I ask.

“Someone will notice,” Carol says. She waves her hand in front of her face like she’s smelled something rancid and returns to her seat.

I wait. The child’s hands are on his face, in his hood, picking at something. I imagine the final autumnal fly has chosen this child’s warm, slimy eye to die in. Now the child must extract the remains.

My boyfriend has never wanted children. When I got pregnant, he accompanied me to the clinic, sat beside me, quietly ate a brownie from the bakery next door.

Before they called my name, he whispered: “I don’t want to force you to do anything you don’t want to.”

I whispered back: “Love is sacrifice.” What I thought was: I would rather kill my child than have you be its father.

I don’t see the boy find his class, but I see him begin to run in their direction. His blue hood flung back, nylon arms swinging. Something inside my chest deflates.

“Carol,” I say and point out the window.

But she has earbuds in. On her computer screen, a man kneels in front of a gravestone and reads his own name.

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SARA KAPLAN-CUNNINGHAM — Sara lives and teaches in Brooklyn, NY. Her writing appears or is forthcoming in The Cincinnati Review, Indiana Review, Sundog Lit, SmokeLong Quarterly, and elsewhere. Read more at sarakaplancunningham.com. 

Art by CATALINA BLAKE — Catalina is a Postmodern American artist known for her two dimensional analog collages, which are composed from a wide variety of source material, including books, magazines, photographs and memorabilia. Each collage is handmade from paper material, and is entirely non digital in its creation. Material is deconstructed and then reconstructed to examine themes such as self awareness, the limitations of social constructs, and the depths of the subconscious. She currently lives in the desert of Oregon with her husband, 4 cats and dog. She can be found at CatalinaBlakeArt.carrd.co