A BARE MINIMUM OF EFFORT
A BARE MINIMUM OF EFFORT
by Brandon Applegate
John snakes his arm under the covers reaching for Cassie. She isn’t there. Gone to check on the baby.
John grimaces. He never hears the baby crying. He’s always been a sound sleeper, and Cassie never wakes him. She gets up and does the job, doesn’t ask for help. And what would he do anyway? The baby wants Cassie, not him—so goes the logic. But logic hasn’t stopped the bags from forming under her eyes, or returned the light to her smile. John has made no special effort, either. He lets her take the bullet.
How long has she been gone tonight? An hour? Five? John looks at the bedside clock. It’s four in the morning and he’s been asleep since eleven.
He swings the bedcovers back and sits up. The cool night air caresses his naked skin and raises gooseflesh.
I’ll go in there and take over. I’ll be a hero, and when she wakes up she’ll smile at me again and we’ll be a little closer to what we used to be.
He stands, then hears breathing behind him. The sound is wet, slow, crackling. His skin tingles with panic. He fights an urge to crawl back into bed and pull the covers over his face.
Then he remembers the monitor. It’s probably Cassie, asleep in the rocker.
Relief floods him. Time to go save Cassie from another sleepless night, to earn his fair maiden’s affection. A bare minimum of effort can seem like an oasis in a desert of inaction.
He navigates the dark hallway, deftly sidestepping strewn toys. When he reaches the door to the baby’s room he palms the doorknob, carefully avoiding the clicks and pops.
Unlike the rest of the house, the darkness in the baby’s room has weight. It clings to him like spiderwebs. Amorphous shadows loom in the black. The dresser, the chair, everything swirls together.
John squints.
Cassie’s breathing—sputtering, nasal.
John pads across the room to the rocker he can barely see and reaches out a hand to place on her shoulder. Instead, he touches the seat-back. She’s not in the chair.
“Cassie?”
The breathing stops. “You’re here. You came.”
John looks around for the source of his wife’s whisper.
“Where are you? I can’t see you.”
“It’s drained me. I’m almost done. Where were you?” Cassie’s voice is thin—tissue paper.
“I—I thought we could switch places.”
Cassie is silent for a beat. “Are you sure?”
“Where are you? Where’s the baby? I can’t see anything.”
Cassie laughs. It’s soft, like weeping. Her face floats in front of him for a moment, dim and blurred, pale skin glowing in the black. She smiles. John hasn’t seen her do that in months. Then she withdraws back into the dark.
John stumbles forward, hands in front of him, reaching for her. He swipes at the air. The blackness moves on the wind like disturbed smoke.
A bundle is dumped into his arms—the baby. He clutches the child to his chest.
“It’s yours now. I’m sorry. I—I’m just so tired.” Cassie’s voice is jubilant, frantic.
The baby squirms. Little hands grab at the skin of John’s chest. Wet lips grope for his nipple.
“No, sweetie,” John says, and pushes the baby gently. “No milk for you there.”
“It doesn’t want milk,” says Cassie.
“What? What does it want?”
She’s gone.
John doesn’t hear her leave, but he feels her absence. The baby’s mouth locks to John’s chest and he feels light, detached. He floats forward to the wall, slides his palm across the textured sheetrock.
This is where the door should be, right? Why isn’t it here?
The baby coos as it sucks.
Fiction © Copyright Brandon Applegate
Photo by Konstantin Mishchenko
Brandon Applegate lives and writes in a parched suburban hellscape near Austin, Texas, with his wife and two daughters who have so far failed to eat him. His debut collection, “Those We Left Behind And Other Sacrifices” is available now on Amazon and on bapplegate.com. More work appears in “Shredded” (Cursed Morsels Press), “Theater Phantasmagoria” (Night Terror Novels), and Crow & Cross Keys. He is the EIC at Hungry Shadow Press, where he edited “It Was All A Dream: An Anthology of Bad Horror Tropes Done Right”. You can find him on Twitter at @brandonappleg8, and Instagram @hungryshadowpress.
