Tag: short-story

Leaking Coconuts

Way Off

MyFathersMirror

Mila was late to school again. It mortified her, having to knock on the front entrance of the director’s office. Tuition was probably late again, and old Ms. Blanco liked to send teachers into the classroom to remind her, right in front of all the other girls. Mila had learned to spot them ahead of time so she could run and hide in the bathroom.

“I’ll just say my dad dropped me off at the wrong spot. Or that the bus broke down… even better: it’s part of my new exercise regimen, and I intended to miss my stop or…”

She missed her stop by a couple blocks. Again.

She wasn’t late often, just enough to feel it. Especially after switching to the public bus at eight, no more pre-class fun with friends who rode to school on the yellow bus. 

There was that one time, though. Mila missed her stop, got off at the next one, and sat on a bench to, what else, come up with something clever to say.

That’s when a teacher from the school spotted her, scooped her up, and drove her straight to the dreaded director’s office.

“I found this girl by the shopping center, way past the park, ” Ms. Duran reported. “Imagine, had it not been for me, no telling where she’d have ended up!”

Mila had been sitting on a bench at a bus stop four blocks away. She didn’t even know where the mall was.

No one asked her a single question. Just condescending looks. She was never late after that, afraid Ms. Duran might find her again and make up something worse.

“It’d sure be easier if I could still ride the yellow bus,” Mila thought. Her parents couldn’t afford the service past first grade, so by eight or nine, the girl had no choice but to take the public bus to school. 

“Dad says we’re saving to donate more to the poor…”

The Nitwitzes

The Nitwitzes

MyFathersMirror

“I want a baby,” Meera announced.
Randolph blinked. “Now? Meera, we got bills. I’m still in school, remember?”

A month later, he strode into work, grinning like he’d won the Pick 5.
“Yo, imma be a dad!”

Silence. Stares.
Then, from the back of the office:
“Uh… congrats, man,” someone mumbled, the enthusiasm flatter than a DMV clerk’s stare.

At some point, Meera called her mother to inform she’d be moving upstate for the rest of the pregnancy for “support.” That lasted five weeks, which exceeded everyone’s expectations. By mid-trimester, she was back in the Bronx.

She and Randolph headed straight to his mother’s housing project apartment, where his older brother had been scrounging off their mother for years. The guy somehow got partial custody of his kids on weekends, so the place was already bursting. Randolph—the only wage earner in the whole setup—was crashing there too. Now Meera sat like a queen on the couch, either unwilling or unable to navigate social services for assistance.

Randolph’s grin was long gone. He seemed equally unwilling or unable to grasp what was really coming.

Much could be said about how society romanticizes childbirth and motherhood. And yes, indescribable admiration goes to women who choose to become mothers. But honestly, some of what goes into the process can be flat-out traumatic. Maybe both things are true. Maybe it can be both, traumatic and beautiful.

Still, here they are, the two nitwits in over their heads and at the center of it all, a baby.

Randolph’s latest mission? Buy a couple dozen cupcakes from the bakery down the street. The kind with blue and white filling revealed when bitten into, an ultra low-budget gender reveal.

Meanwhile, Meera, still in a kind of stupor, struggles to navigate even state medical coverage, let alone housing or other basic resources.

And yet, somehow, the baby’s coming anyway.

The baby is coming.