The Cold Baby by Christopher Ananias 

Content that some readers may find disturbing.

She must have looked alluring, though, on her midnight shopping trips to Walmart. He imagined a shopping cart full of red meat and baby clothes. Dr. Lieberman worked alone inside the morgue. The temperature had dropped twenty degrees.

 A toe tag, said Jane Doe. Lieberman, a single man in his mid-forties, studied her with a clinical detachment which made him a poor guest at the hospital mixers. Her enormous stomach under the sheet was hard to miss. It would be a cold baby.

The body under the sheet jerked its toe tag at 6:01 as the All Hallows Eve sun drifted on the horizon like a bleeding eye. “It’s just a reflex,” said Doctor Lieberman to the lab rats watching him, waiting for him to refill the sugar water dispenser.

He studied her face. She looked like she was sleeping, but her chest would never rise, and probably hadn’t since the Berlin Wall fell. Blond 1980s hair (very tall-very outdated), framed a lovely face with high cheekbones. His finger traced her lips. He pressed into the flesh of her upper lip and felt a solid bump, one on each side. He worked his finger into her mouth in the cold saliva. A gleaming sharp tooth appeared dripping a tear of spit. 

She wore a pastel green maternity dress with a white triangular collar. The triangle seemed to fit her somehow, making her look like she had sharp edges that might cut you. Her breasts were full but cold. Lieberman knew that if he were to pinch the nipple. Blood would likely come out, and in that case, he may as well cremate the body and the baby.

He picked up a sharpened wooden dowel rod from a five-gallon bucket. Smacking it in his hand—feeling the weight—like a cop with a nightstick. He dimpled her left breast with the sharp point and struck it with a heavy rubber mallet. WHACK!

It was overkill—the pounding—but seemed necessary. The lab rats, in the cages, squeaked their disapproval! She made no move. She was dead—un-alive for good—probably from tainted blood.

Feeling the rats judging him he said, “See she was already dead or undead, or whatever…She can’t hurt us now.” The white rats looked at him with the red-eyed skepticism of a captive.

He felt the tremor of a kick somewhere below. The baby was clinging onto the last of its mother’s life or un-life—screw it. 

There was no antiseptic or anesthesia mask. The incision into her belly would shock a maternity doctor. He cut vertically just like an autopsy, so later it would show he did his duty—reminding him to snap a few shots with the high-powered Paparazzi FLASH-FLASH of the Nikon.

Lieberman wrestled around inside her bulging stomach, like being elbow-deep in a punch bowl of cold gray jelly. Her insides smelled like freshly overturned earth. The baby finally came out. The umbilical cord was as thick as a drainpipe. He cut it with skin shears. 

The baby boy sat on the cold steel table, smelling like a bag of corroded pennies. It had that old man look and Lieberman could tell it was not of this world. The eyes knew everything. The eyes had lived forever and willed him not to cremate it.

Dr. Lieberman cleaned off the slimy afterbirth and swaddled the baby in a white towel. He offered it some warm milk from an eyedropper, but the baby sat like a newborn bird shaking and unable to eat.

“You want the red stuff?”

He flicked a little blood on his wrist from a pan warming on a Bunsen burner. Blood donated for a Red Cross blood drive. Lieberman squirted a little into its mouth and it went into a frenzy licking, wanting more. “Hum.” Lieberman filled up a good-sized bottle used for dispensing sugar water to the lab rats. He was testing a new opioid on them—a supposedly non-addictive opioid. He put a clean nipple on it.

He watched the baby drain the rat’s bottle of warm blood. “I better give the little fellow another bottle,” he said to the strung-out rats upset about not getting their addictive sugar water.

Dr. Lieberman got the baby quieted down after a long crying fit. It tried to crawl back inside its mother. The doctor rocked the cold baby, and it tried to bite Lieberman several times on the neck but had no teeth. It was like getting kissed by a snowball.

Lieberman rolled the cart with the baby’s beautiful mother to the crematorium chute. He could hear the rats squeaking, practically screaming, as the window disappeared. The gurney rolled down a long musty tunnel, Lieberman barely touching it.

The newborn laid on his mother’s hollowed midsection, sinking into the bloodied sheet. He was pitiful, making little hissing goo-goo sounds not understanding his mother would become ashes. Lieberman thought, What should I do? Why didn’t I just cremate her before I pulled him out of her, and now I feel sorry for it. And… I let the rats down, too. I need to feed them since I turned them into drug addicts. Stupid ass Purdue Pharma, liars.

Lieberman was barely pushing the gurney. He was certain it was moving by itself. He rolled it to a squeaking stop up to the cremation chute—fighting his thoughts. The baby was staring at Lieberman. It had a sad look on his face. Lieberman pushed the green button, and the crematorium bellows went HUFF, shaking the chute. He could just ram them in there and be done with it. He would start with the mother, that was easy. “Say goodbye to your Mommy, little fellow.”

The baby looked at his mother and started crying. Lieberman picked him up, and it tried to gum his neck with his frigid mouth. “Stop it, you little devil.” He laughed and set its cold little body on the cement floor.

Lieberman heard vampires didn’t like to have any Christian words said at their funerals. “I’m sorry Hun, I shouldn’t have been so harsh opening you up. I’m just an old pathologist, not an obstetrician. Sorry about that stake business…” Lieberman pulled down the sheet and expected her to be grinning like in a horror movie, but this was real life. She looked asleep.

He pulled a stiff lever on the gurney, and her body kicked up like she was going to do a round over, blond hair flowing over her face. She took off faster than he expected, sliding down the chute. “Goodbye, beautiful.” A couple of loud bangs, and then a searing black cloud blinded him, and he shut the door.

Dr. Lieberman picked up the infant wondering if he could get used to his cold little body. Without the mother by the time it was two, it would be out at night killing chickens. Lieberman thought about the little monster eating his Pekingese, Buster. That almost swayed him—plus being tied down to a dangerous baby. No way.

He held the newborn at the top of the chute, like a doting parent at the park holding a kid at the top of a little slide. He rationalized it wasn’t human, so it wasn’t murder. It said something like, “Poop-poop” and then clearly said, “Da-Da” and reached out and smiled the cutest little smile. It was supernatural, had to have been. Now he didn’t know what to do.

Okay. I’ll flip a coin. “Heads you stay tails you go.” he said to the baby. The coin bounced on the cement and rolled, did a little circle and the eagle shined. He put the baby up on the chute like a doting parent again for a fun trip down the park’s slide. A scream came up from the fire. Lieberman couldn’t do it.

He rolled the baby back to the lab. He fed the rats sugar water mixed with the opioid he was testing. It was supposed to be non-addictive. He watched the rats fighting each other for a drink at the dispenser. He didn’t enjoy hurting the rats. The baby started crying. He warmed more blood on the Bunsen burner and gave it the rat’s other bottle.

Everything calmed down, the dope sick rats were relaxed in their cages nodding out. Lieberman stroked the white downy fur of a smaller one, he named Oscar. Someday he was going to let them loose at the dump.

The infant was watching him; it was full of wants and needs. Lieberman had created a dependent. He looked at the clock and it was 8:45. Maybe he could make it to Lew’s Lounge in time for some meat loaf—sometimes Lynn, the bartender, warmed him up a plate.

A foul smell assaulted Lieberman. The baby wetted the white towel turning it pink. Could he deal with such smells? And wasn’t it kind of awful how cold the baby was with its ice box heart. He would have to bathe and feed it blood. Bottles of blood by the milk in the fridge—then he’d have to heat it. Flies buzzing. Setting a crib up in the damp basement where it would die like it had SIDS every morning, and resurrect every evening, crying for blood, and love. If it wandered into the light, it could catch his house on fire. Would the insurance cover that? 

It sat there on the steel gurney cooing and sucking the bottle. Lieberman picked up a stake. The infant rolled on its pudgy back, smiled and wrapped its tiny fingers around the smooth sharp dowel that was raised over his heart.  

Lieberman got ready to leave and shut the lights off on the sleeping rats. Their routine of another day as living experiments had ended. Oscar laid in his coat pocket. No one would miss a little lab rat.

While crossing the dark parking lot, he thought about how he was going to make up for things. How Oscar would have a spacious cage, with a hamster wheel, carrots and lettuce twice a day, and as a special homecoming treat, cubed ham that goes on salads. There would be a period of suffering, though. He would wean Oscar off the narcotic.

Christopher Ananias

Image: A very inquisitive white rat from Freepic.com