By Rebecca Klassen
For nine months you’ve been eating the best things for our child. Shakespeare, Dickens, Bronte; you ate the shredded pages with chopsticks. I smashed the calculator and you swallowed the buttons and shattered microprocessor like aspirin. The mortarboard took you weeks; so chewy! Now you’re pushing and I seem… azure curls, a tomato nose, pink cheeks, a rainbow two piece and flower brooch on our tiny baby’s lapel. The enormous shoes are your hardest push. He’s out. With white-gloved fingers he squirts us with water from his flower brooch, honks his nose, and we reach for him together, laughing so hard.
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Rebecca Klassen is fiction editor of The Phare and lives in Gloucestershire. She won the London Independent Story Prize and was shortlisted for the Bridport Prize and the Alpine Fellowship. Her stories have featured in Fictive Dream, Mslexia, Flash Frontier, New Flash Fiction Review, Baltimore Review, and on BBC radio.