Two Stories by Kelly R. Samuels
Rumination on Babies
Where is the baby? Every morning I ask myself this, seeing her pass with the stroller, empty. It disconcerts. I finish my route, swinging my arms, though not in any way informed or refreshed.
We used to push our baby doll strollers around, sometimes dangerously careening. My doll had arrived in a pink case with a metal clasp. She had glossy brown hair in two braids and eyes with thick, stiff lashes that opened and shut. Her four outfits were prim and proper—skirts to knee, socks to mid-calf. She wore granny cotton panties that covered the smooth pale space between her hinged legs. She had no tortuous parts, hollow as she was.
There were others, softer: the red-headed albino with a triangle nose. She sported hair impossible to comb with its excessive number of loops but legs I could bend back and prop on her shoulders. Her mouth seemed like an afterthought—after that hair and nose, those black fabric discs we called eyes.
The last was a blonde with breasts but no nipples. Blue-eyed, of the sun, she was one for the prone state, to rub against Ken: two sticks for a fire. I cut her hair then sold her for $2.
Later, my mother fretted over whether I could manage a real baby, even if just down the road, minutes away, if need be. Would I know to cradle the head? Were the risks worth the late nights, the crumpled dollar bills that went for nail polish in garish colors?
Much later, I tried being a marsupial mother but fell prey to neckaches and gave in to the stroller with its handy basket. I’d walk city streets not unlike these, now, but more slowly, speaking words that were beyond comprehension.
There were babies everywhere. Everyone seemed to have at least one. We all smelled of milk and wore our greasy hair in ponytails. We craved sleep like we had once craved sex. In this, there was nothing new.
No one walked an empty stroller with that avid look in their eyes that she has. No one sang lullabies to what wasn’t there.
Moirae
I picture you in a cave. One of you hunched from the endless work assigned you, you who spins never resting—always so many to be done, being born. I see what adorns us, what we wear in your name: Clotho, cloth, our tired apparel. I see you with your spindle, that rotating axis of wood, in your hand worn and yet functioning. In tandem with you, a kind of dance or conversation.
The others measure and cut—She who cannot be turned perhaps the most feared, the one to butter and woo, though the thread’s length seems, to me, to matter, like that mythical life line on our palms.
Old and ugly and lame, I’ve been told. Though also called goddesses and sometimes, even, wearing that of queens: crowns. Sometimes carrying a scepter, symbol of dominion—gold or gold with stone, with wink of gem. And on this tapestry, richlyhued gowns to trod on the near-dead girl—her cheeks still rosy, her eyes still open and still capable of sight.
Which is it then? In your cave with your pasty skin and graying hair and wattle, bitter and bickering amongst yourselves or out among the day, among the flowering hedge, out for a morning constitutional and chat—you, Clotho, golden haired and just about to smile.
Maybe both, as your name means parts and shares and allotted portions. As there are scraps and bits of us never fully seen nor understood. What we keep to ourselves. The crone, rigid and implacable. The fresh faced, cheerful and pleasing, doing what must be done.
Kelly R. Samuels is the author of two poetry collections and five chapbooks—the most recent Oblivescence, a finalist for the Edna Meudt Poetry Book Award (Red Sweater Press, 2024), and The Sailing Place (Bottlecap Press, 2026.) She is a Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net nominee with poetry recently appearing in Denver Quarterly, Laurel Review, and The Glacier and prose in McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, Five on the Fifth, and The Argyle. She lives in the Upper Midwest.
