Stroller
Gretchen left her apartment Monday to find a stroller in the hallway, abandoned beside her door. It was old and dirty, one of the wheels missing on the left side. In the carriage was not a baby, but a nest of wrinkled receipts.
“Yours, dear?” Ms. Karakum, her neighbor, peered out at Gretchen from behind a cracked door. The inside of her apartment was always dark, her face at the door like a dying candle.
“No.” Gretchen shook her head. “I don’t have a kid.”
“That’s right,” Ms. Karakum said, voice little more than a whisper. “We are both solitary passengers.” She smiled a bit, then withdrew to her apartment. Gretchen looked down the hallway. Plain white walls and tired beige carpeting that hadn’t been vacuumed in who knows how long. There was only one other apartment on their floor, but it hadn’t been occupied for over a year. Gretchen stared at the crinkled bed of receipts in the stroller. Though she could plainly see there was nothing underneath them, just the torn fabric of the carriage, it felt as if there was.
***
At work, there was a lot of excitement about her coworker Mason’s new baby. Gretchen thought of the stroller outside her apartment and all those receipts, some invisible thing squirming beneath them. Mason was going around to everyone’s cubicle, showing them pictures. Gretchen put her headphones on when he got to the accounting department. She pretended to focus on her screen and waited a bit, then looked over her shoulder, figuring Mason had moved on. But there he stood.
“Hey Gretchen,” he muttered. “I have, uh, pictures of the baby.”
Gretchen smiled and nodded. Mason inched forward, his face greasy and drained of color, until the screen of his phone was before her. The screen showed a baby. It was, Gretchen thought, a perfectly standard baby. Mason’s finger swiped through several more photos. The finger trembled a bit over the screen, Mason pausing between pictures to give Gretchen enough time to take them in.
“Cute,” Gretchen said.
“Her name’s Gretchen, too” Mason said, chuckling. “Named after my grandmother.”
“Not after me?” Gretchen joked.
“Oh, well, no,” Mason said, looking at his phone. “After my grandmother.”
“I was just kidding,” Gretchen said.
“Oh, right.” Mason put a hand on his chest and his face contorted with laughter, though he made barely a sound, only a slight wheezing noise, like rusted ventilation. “That was funny,” he said.
Gretchen nodded, then looked at the floor until Mason left.
***
During her lunch, Gretchen sat alone in the break room and thought about baby- Gretchen, everything new to her, her existence a blank slate. It seemed unfair that this would be her one shot; that in thirty years she wouldn’t get to go back to where she was now and have a second chance at life. Didn’t everyone deserve that? The world was too punishing to navigate ably the first time around.
Gretchen chewed on her sandwich, rubbery and sour-tasting. Soon Mika from sales came into the break room and leaned onto the table.
“You see baby Gretchen?” She asked.
“Mason showed me,” Gretchen said.
Mika went to the coffee station and got a mug out of the cabinet. “What a cutie, huh? Almost makes me want kids. Emphasis on the almost.”
“I think I’m jealous of her,” Gretchen said.
Mika leaned back against the counter with her coffee. She had black hair that hung down to her neck and wore a blouse patterned with tiny slices of pizza. “Everyone’s jealous of babies,” she said. “You just have to think like, well, I’m not this beautiful baby with zero emotional damage and its whole life ahead of it, but also I can drink, and I’m not shitting my pants all the time.”
Gretchen laughed half-heartedly. What was the emotional damage of nothingness? She wondered. What were the marks made on one’s soul by a life of blank spaces?
***
When Gretchen got home, the stroller was still there in the hallway beside her door. She peered into the carriage. Were there more receipts in it than before? The nest of them seemed thicker now, and taller, rising halfway to the lip of the carriage. Gretchen picked one up and examined it, but the print was too faint to make out. She tried another, but it, too, had faded beyond readability. They were all like that, she realized, all of them vague and indecipherable with age.
Her apartment was cold and dark. Gretchen got the leftover Chinese takeout she had in the fridge and turned on the television, covering herself with a blanket. An old black-and-white horror movie was on featuring a rubber-suited monster chasing after a plucky newswoman. Gretchen tried to follow the story, but she couldn’t stop thinking about the stroller, parked just outside her door, as if waiting to get in. She decided she would wheel it out to the street if it was still there in the morning.
Gretchen turned the heater off and went to bed. Through the wall in her bedroom she could hear Ms. Karakum ironing. She had insomnia, and during the night would iron all the old dresses in her closet. The sound, like an iron lung in a lonely hospital wing, had become a comfort to Gretchen, soothing her to sleep.
***
Her dreams were occupied by strange, disjointed sequences; Ms. Karakum, ironing a rubber suit of herself by candlelight; Mason, holding baby Gretchen in his arms as he roamed the office, a slow rain of receipts floating down from the ceiling; and finally Mika, taking her hand and leading her into the vacant apartment at the end of the hall, then disappearing. Alone, Gretchen went from room to room, all of them empty. Why was she here? Where had Mika gone? Outside the windows, there was nothing but a thick wall of fog.
Gretchen woke with a lingering sense of confusion. She got up, made coffee, and ate a slice of toast, looking out at the drab gray morning. The silence felt overwhelming. One shouldn’t ever have to hear their own chewing, she decided.
In the hallway, the stroller was still there, the receipts piled higher, nearly reaching the top. Who kept putting them there? Gretchen took the handlebar and wheeled the stroller out to the street. It kept swerving due to the missing wheel, and she had to right it repeatedly. It didn’t feel like enough for the stroller to simply be moved out of the building, so she pushed it two blocks down, leaving it beside the dumpster of another complex. There, she thought.
***
The day seemed to drag on forever. Gretchen had a sick feeling that she would return home to find that the stroller had resumed its post beside her door, receipts overflowing from the carriage. At one point she thought she heard a baby crying, and stood nervously to look over the walls of her cubicle.
There she was: baby Gretchen, crying and flailing about on Mason’s computer screen, just a few cubicles away. Gretchen could see the top of Mason’s head as he leaned towards the screen, the gray spots in his hair like little colonies of decay.
“There she is,” he kept saying. “There’s Gretchen.”
There it is, Gretchen thought. A completely new person. For just a moment, baby Gretchen looked up over the cubicle walls, locking eyes with her. Gretchen quickly sat back down. Baby Gretchen cried and cried. She didn’t realize that she had no reason to cry, that adults were the ones with endless reasons to cry and no one to listen to them.
“There she is,” Mason’s voice eeked across the office. “There’s Gretchen.”
***
Mika stopped by Gretchen’s cubicle on her way out and asked if she wanted to go out later.
“Sounds fun,” Gretchen said, downplaying her excitement. A night out together was something real friends did, a push past the casual comradery of their workplace relationship.
“Good,” Mika said. “Because sweet baby Gretchen do I need a drink.”
To Gretchen’s relief, the hallway remained empty when she got home. She made dinner and took a shower, putting on a modest blue dress she’d only worn a handful of times over the last few years. As she locked up her apartment to leave, Gretchen heard the whispering creak of Ms. Karakum’s door behind her, wedging open to reveal the old woman’s shadowed visage.
“A night on the town?” She asked, voice throaty and hushed, like a rusted fan blowing weakly in some forgotten corner.
“My first in a while,” Gretchen said.
“A celebration of youth,” Ms. Karakum said. “Good for you, dear. There is never anything to celebrate alone.”
Gretchen smiled and stood there another moment, then said goodnight and left down the hall.
***
The bar they met at was crowded and dimly lit. Gretchen ordered a vodka martini and squeezed into an open section of seating with Mika. Mika hadn’t changed from her work outfit: a fish-patterned blouse tucked into a pencil skirt. More than that, her personality and level of comfort seemed to be the same at the bar as it would have been anywhere else. Gretchen longed to move through the world like that, to feel at home in its spaces, to be a part of the picture instead of a superimposed image.
“So what’s going on with grown-up Gretchen?” Mika asked.
Gretchen paused. This was usually the part where she would say something like nothing much or the usual, terrible answers rising from hollow places inside of her. Instead she told Mika about the stroller in the hallway, about the receipts.
“That’s weird,” Mika said. “Maybe somewhere there’s a baby trapped in someone’s folder of financial records.”
“And someone keeps adding more,” Gretchen continued, an anxious edge to her voice.
“More?”
“Receipts.”
Mika shrugged. “Someone on your floor?”
“I had to move it,” Gretchen said, holding tight to her glass. “I had this feeling that when the receipts reached the top, something terrible would happen.”
Mika was looking at her strangely. “What did you think would happen?”
“I don’t know,” Gretchen said. “Just something bad.”
The music and chatter all around them seemed to go quiet a moment, swallowed by the discomfort in Mika’s eyes.
“I’m gonna get another drink,” Mika said, standing from the table. Gretchen nodded and looked down at her glass. By the time Mika returned, the noise in the room had leveled out. What Gretchen liked most was the laughter that rippled through the space, friendly and warm.
Mika took a swig of her beer. “John’s gonna be here soon.” John was Mika’s fiancé. Gretchen had never met him, but Mika had shown her a picture once. Gretchen wished he wasn’t coming; she couldn’t help feeling like a third wheel around couples. Mika looked at her. “Hey, it’s been a weird week with all this baby stuff,” she said in a mollifying tone. “But don’t worry, I’m staying childless as you.”
Gretchen finished her drink. “I don’t want a baby,” She mumbled, mostly to herself. “I just want.”
But Mika was already standing and making her way to the door, where she met John as he entered and gave him a kiss. Gretchen felt a pang in her chest. She got up and closed her tab. She said goodbye to Mika, telling John it was nice to meet him, even though she hadn’t said her name.
“I forgot I have to go in early tomorrow,” she lied.
“No worries, babe,” Mika said, giving her a quick hug before disappearing into the crowd.
***
At work the next day, there was a stroller left beside the elevator, shiny and new, void of receipts. Gretchen hurried down the hall and ducked into her cubicle. The erratic laughter of baby Gretchen bubbled up from the other side of the office. The voices of her coworkers cooed beneath it, their tones lifted and fun-housed. Gretchen signed into her computer and opened the accounting software, just like she did every morning. She began executing first-priority tasks from the queue, just like she did every morning. She paused to get coffee from the break-room, just like she did every morning.
On the way back to her desk, she saw a pair of suited arms hoist baby Gretchen up above Mason’s cubicle, holding her there. Baby Gretchen appeared frightened for a moment, but then seemed to gain her bearings, looking out across the office with curiosity.
Her eyes landed on Gretchen.
Gretchen shifted her gaze to the floor, but she could still feel the baby staring at her, eyes glassy with a terribly innocent indifference, like an insect observing the slow death of another.
Gretchen went to the bathroom and sat in one of the stalls, waiting until baby Gretchen was taken home. She couldn’t stand to look at it again, to see in its face the million chances to live that she would never have again. Eventually she heard a clutter of doting goodbyes from out on the floor, and the usual hush of the office was restored, spread thick over an undercurrent of phones and business cadence. Gretchen returned to her desk, signed back into her computer, and resumed executing the day’s tasks.
The morning sogged into afternoon. Gretchen felt as if she were wearing a rubber suit of herself, every limb heavier, every sound muffled and stretched like taffy, everything she felt buffered by layers of some strange anesthesia. Her mind, she thought, was filling with smoke, smoke that was corroding the lining of her senses. At one point Mika was standing by her cubicle, saying something about last night. Gretchen just nodded. Mika gave her that look again, like she was from a different species. Then she was gone.
Gretchen finished every task in the queue and left the office early. No one seemed to take any notice. The ding of the elevator echoed dully in her ears the whole way down.
***
Gretchen lay in bed, wide-awake. It had been hours like this now, evening turning to night and night turning to the dead of night. Through the wall there came the gentle exhale of steam from Ms. Karakum’s iron. In her mind’s eye, Gretchen saw the stroller. It sat in shadow beside the dumpster, tilted on the side of its missing wheel. Something was burning at the bottom of the carriage. The fire somehow wasn’t catching the receipts, small trails of smoke coming up through their cover. Gretchen watched, hypnotized.
Suddenly things shifted and she was in the stroller, placidly aflame. The receipts on top of her felt heavy, as if made of led.
***
Gretchen woke up panting. What time was it? It was still dark, but she didn’t hear Ms. Karakum ironing. She got up and wandered to the kitchen for a glass of water. The weight of the receipts seemed to have stuck to her, and every movement was an effort. The clock in the kitchen read 3:07. She tried to take a drink of water, but her arm could hardly get the glass off the counter. Did she pull a muscle in her sleep? But it was every muscle, pinned down and turned to jelly, as if she were dragging stones around the morning after running a marathon.
Leaving the kitchen, she realized that moving was easier if she went towards the front door. If she diverted by stepping into the hallway, heading towards her bedroom, it was as if she were walking into a strong wind. Her muscles were stronger, the weight on them lighter, as long as she was going in the direction of the door. It continued like this out into the hallway. Gretchen stood and felt around for a give in the pressure pushing down on her body. She soon found it, like a pathway in the air, leading her towards the empty apartment at the end of the hall.
Its door was ajar.
Gretchen’s thoughts grew faint and opaque, melting into a muddled soup of fear and confusion. She couldn’t remember why she was in the hallway, standing in front of the door at the end of the hall. When she tried to turn around, the pressure against her was remarkably strong. She continued into the empty apartment. Candles lit her path on either side of the foyer. Her movements felt less and less her own; rather it was as if her body were being pulled forward by some outside party. She came to the living room.
In the center of the floor sat the stroller, now empty. A clutter of candles had been placed around it, illuminating the receipts that lined the walls. Gretchen watched her feet approach the stroller, then stop.
“There she is,” a voice floated into the room. “There’s Gretchen.”
Timothy Day lives with his plants in Portland, Oregon. He holds an MFA in creative writing from Portland State University and his fiction has appeared in Booth, The Adroit Journal, Barren Magazine, and elsewhere. You can find links to his work here: https://timothysomeday.wixsite.com/website.