Moving Home

She says I need to wear diapers because I might wet the bed.

Her cigarette is burned up and the cherry has fallen out, but she pulls it to her lips and inhales.

I tell her I don’t remember wetting the bed.

She folds towels, rolling them into little logs, which is the only way towels can be folded in this house.

“You did when you were really little,” she says, unrolling a towel and then re-rolling it tighter. “Diapers are in the hall closet. Next to the toilet paper.”

The package has pictures of toddlers crawling across puffy pink clouds. They’re all smiling.

Not smiling, I tell her I won’t wear diapers.

But she holds me down, strong for an old woman. Her hands look weak, but they’re weathered from work, from years of weeding the two-acre front yard. I remember she said weeds have no place in her lawn and that spraying chemicals would only hurt the grass or the insects that lived there. She pulls my pants down and I hear the material rip. Her nails dig into my sides as she pins the diaper on. I wonder if little pieces of my skin are stuck underneath her nails.

The material bulges under my pants and I crackle when I walk.

For breakfast there are mashed pears from a Gerber jar. There’s an oversized highchair. Where do you even get a highchair to fit a twenty-eight year old? But it fits, or rather, I fit. She straps me in with old seat belts she’s hot-glued to the sides.

I tell her we need to talk.

She makes vroom-vroom airplane noises, grabs my hair, yanks me back and shoves the mashed pears in my mouth. They’re good. They’re really good. Like something I never tasted before. Sweet and clean and smooth, rolling down my throat.

I sit up. She comes at me with the vroom-vroom airplane noises again and this time I open my mouth.

“There now,” she says. “Wasn’t that good?”

I nod my head.

She feeds me so fast I can’t swallow. Pear mush runs down my chin and clumps in my hair. She wipes my mouth and scrubs my hands and between my fingers. She says I’m a good girl.

“We really need to talk.”

“Shhh,” she says, unstrapping me from the highchair.

While I’m in the bathroom she stands outside the door and asks if I need anything. I put my hands on the mirror and lean forward. No make-up, no hairspray, no bra. Pear is matted in my hair. My face and neck and arms are sticky.

“I’m fine,” I say.

She follows me back to the kitchen, petting my hair as we walk.

My pajamas have pictures of bears on them. I don’t know what happened to my other clothes. My duffel bag is empty, except for some lint and a couple pennies.

“Where are my clothes?”

“What clothes?” she asks.

“The clothes I brought with me.”

She nods at the laundry room. “I’m washing them,” she says.

I pull open the dryer door, but my clothes aren’t inside. Instead, there are miniature pink pants, maybe big enough for my arm, tiny shirts with lambs on the front and little yellow and pink socks.

“What am I supposed to do with these?”

My keys aren’t on the counter. My cell phone is gone too.

“This isn’t funny.”

She pulls a jar from the cabinet.

“Do you want some plums?”

“I want my keys. And my phone.”

She drags me back to the highchair and pulls the straps across me, pinching my skin.

“They’re better than the pears,” she says.

“We need to talk.”

She twists open the jar and says, “be a good girl.”

“This isn’t…”

“Shhh,” she says, stuffing plums in my mouth.

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Brandi Wells has fiction in McSweeney’s, Bust Down the Door and Eat All the Chickens, Smokelong Quarterly and Hobart. She has a chapbook forthcoming as part the chapbook collective Fox Force 5, which is being released by Paper Hero Press. She blogs at http://brandiwells.blogspot.com/