Congratulations
The first Christmas my wife teaches kindergarten, our daughter, Aurora, is one and a half years old. My wife is allowed a three-week winter break. Neither of us has held a job that gives so much time off. We lost our end-of-fall baby. We don’t know what to do with the time. The first Christmas my wife teaches kindergarten, we spend the break cleaning house: flattening and stacking enough cardboard for a poor princess to prove her worth on, sorting baby clothes to donate, taking turns with a Louisville bat hitting dishes into the tree line—depleting the cupboards down to the essentials; we compartmentalize space, all under a guise of riddance. We rid, and rid, and the hospital calls every day to say we need to pay for the lab work and ultrasounds. The first Christmas my wife teaches kindergarten, I go to Family Dollar once, not thinking the $10 test will be positive. I go out a second time for a confirmation test, this time to Dollar General. I avoid the Family Dollar because I don’t want the same clerk to see me buy a second test. Ten weeks after the first Christmas my wife teaches kindergarten, the heart clocks 170 beats per minute, strong. The legs are long. We know how important it is to hold fast and quiet. The technician passes my wife nine-frame stills like a receipt. We hand the images back and forth. At home, we use a Country Music Hall of Fame clip magnet to add the photos—like we had done with Aurora’s—to a scattered collage on the fridge, next to our families’ latest news, old wedding and birthday invitations, and a picture of us at MOSI in a photo booth surrounded by a green-screen nebula, me flying a wax replica of Space Shuttle Atlantis over my wife’s head. Ten weeks after the first Christmas my wife teaches kindergarten, we stand in front of the refrigerator and know good times are not always rare.
Michael Hammerle (@mike_hammerle) is pursuing his MFA at the University of Arkansas at Monticello where he teaches composition. He holds a BA in English from the University of Florida. He is the founder of Middle House Review. His fiction has been published in The Best Small Fictions 2017, selected by Amy Hempel. His prose and poetry have been published in, or are forthcoming from, Drunk Monkeys, New Flash Fiction Review, New World Writing, the Matador Review, After the Pause, BULL, Misfit Magazine, Door Is A Jar, and many more magazines. He lives and writes in Gainesville, FL.