Fiction

Because a time does come to start thinking about babies or, more rightly, a baby; and since that time seems to come sooner than expected — watching young mothers sway…

“Just one?” I look up from the notice of pool opening hours suspiciously. The lady behind the ticket desk absently strokes a pair of Speedo goggles in the lost-and-found box…

“Looks like you’ve got your hands full,” says the dad who is wearing his baby in a purple tye-dyed sling. “I don’t know how you do it.” I look down…

Across from me, Mr. Vela sits with my daughter Madeleine. His tall body slouches to the side because he doesn’t fit under the second grade table. Madeleine, a “fluent reader,”…

When Leo’s daughter was born he looked at her once through the viewing glass of the hospital nursery and then turned and left the hospital, relieved that it was all…

“Mother,” J.J. says, as she stretches her arms to the woman standing before her. The woman wears a lacy turquoise dress, a thinly woven shawl, and an excited grin, which…

Jill is my daughter’s birth mom, a good girl by all accounts, just shy of seventeen when she gave birth. Her story is a familiar tale, girl meets boy, girl…

Every time I shifted my weight, Barney’s stomach rippled between my legs at the bottom of the plastic baby pool. I didn’t want a Barney baby pool, didn’t even know…

“Ri-car-do!” the tan, sleek woman yelled from her chaise lounge. “Stop that! Don’t sweat!” Theresa didn’t really need to give Melanie that jab in her arm. She was already giggling…

There’s something wrong with Kat’s plumbing. Kat doesn’t know where she first heard those words as they apply to a woman’s lower anatomy. She does know that as Jasper drives…

Amy hunches on the bleachers, at a slight remove from the regular moms with their pressed jeans, mascara carefully applied even at this hour. She sips her cold coffee, slowly…