Alice
My baby is in an envelope
on the passenger seat of my car.
I’m driving down the highway,
it’s hot outside, hotter than yesterday.
A man with curly hair paid for my package
because I’d come with no money,
just my blue dress.
I’m looking at the passenger seat now.
An orange paper bubble mailer,
the kind they mail you jewelry in,
spare toy parts, small wallets.
Inside the envelope, Alice is doing backflips.
I named my baby Alice.
She’s asking me to play Enjoy the Silence,
but I only want to listen to Vienna.
She doesn’t mind Billy Joel.
When I try to cry,
my eyes feel like the ball
on roller-ball deodorant.
Wet, but not.
I’m crying — well,
I’m trying to cry —
and now inside the envelope, Alice is in Vienna
for university, planning a trip to Prague.
She doesn’t write me much and she never calls.
All the Austrian boys tell her she’s very pretty
and she spits on them.
I drive past my house,
and there’s a dog
that’s been hit by a car
on the side of the road.
There’s a smattering of flies,
and its upturned feet,
stiff, are frozen in arabesque.
I don’t know where I’m going.
The surgeon who cut me open,
carved Alice out of my fallopian tube
and put her in the cup
that I forgot in the dresser at my parents house
said that she would have killed me.
When I asked my mother to mail her to me,
I called her my baby.
“I left my baby in a cup in my side table drawer.”
When she called me to tell me she’d put her in the post,
she called her my specimen.
“Your specimen will be on the afternoon flight, morning flight got cancelled.”
When I turn in to my driveway,
a green parrot flies in with me.
I didn’t want a baby.
Samantha Singh is a Belizean-American writer, raised in, and now living in Belize. She studied English at Loyola in New Orleans and spent several years working in media and writing in the US following graduation before moving back home to Belize, where she now lives on the beach with her menagerie of house pets.