Godzilla stomps down the interstate shoulder, overturning billboards with gigantic baby heads and menacing adult teeth and baby bodies, advertisements for pregnancy crisis centers, and scripture signs warning of HELL for baby killers. She flattens them like Burma Shave signs until all that’s left is Baby Baby because nothing rhymes with baby really. The singular Planned Parenthood sign stands resolute as Godzilla steps over it.
Women in white virginal nightgowns follow her like she’s a piper with no pipes, nestling themselves in plantation farm cotton that blows up against the guardrails when the walk becomes too much. They reach out their hands to this interstate interloper loping down the road. Godzilla stomps on the cotton fields for good measure, for the good girls and the bad girls, too, all with their various stages of swollen bellies and swollen hearts, flat tummies and flat emotions.
She turns her head near the edge of Alabama, looks directly at me in my sub-compact, sub-debt car painted in safety orange. I wonder if I should be afraid of her, with her dragon eyes and bumpy Japanese exterior stumbling down a rural road. I instinctively glide over into the other lane so that I’m not squished under her giant feet. She smiles and pats her distended belly. I can see the outline of tiny monster feet in there, counting a dozen before she turns back to her task at hand.
There’s a hospital just in sight, one that looks big enough and maybe well-equipped, hopefully open. A collective gasp breaks out on the interstate.
I’m on the way to somewhere, too, with three screaming babies of my own in the back (and one in the front of me) lying in ’70s car beds with no seat belts, bottles hanging out of their mouths like they’re lazy milk drunks because I can’t feed them and drive. I only planned for one husband and one child but there was a motorcycle accident, and more than one birth control accident, youth, society, and my mother got the better of me. My children are wrapped in cast-off billboard fabric stitched into playsuits and sleepers, probably flammable or laced with lead, but cast-offs are what cast-offs get according to my mama.
I nicknamed each baby after the birth control that failed me.
Coil
Pill
Vas
People often asked me if I was their sister or their nanny or if they were triplets.
“Irish triplets,” I joked as if that was a thing. I am Irish and they are each less than a year apart so it might be true.
I’m not alone on this road. We’re—pregnant, miscarrying, chapel- bound, teenager, geriatric—all driving at top speed behind Godzilla in some kind of weird reverse movie low-speed chase. Women with their feet out of windows and their bellies out of terry tube tops. Women out on their lunch breaks, still in high heels and girdles to hide their stomachs from their employers. It’s like an Easter parade minus floral hats, just fast cars and police siren accompaniments toward the hospital on the other side of the tracks, track marks, and velvet tracksuits.
There are occasional husbands, boyfriends, partners, ne’er-do-wells, and doing-well men along for the ride. Blasé and worried, anxious and indifferent, they’re holding cash and sometimes, a hand. Most often, a cell phone or a deck of cards or another woman’s fingers.
I can see another monster waiting in front of the hospital. He’s tapping his foot and is surrounded by snuffed-out pink and blue bubble gum cigars. He looks impatient as he watches Godzilla mow down the interstate signage surrounded by a crowd of cotton and women.
The cop cars give chase at the border but they can’t catch everyone.
Godzilla arrives at the hospital, bits of signs and cotton fluff under her feet but there are only chains on the door and women wearing delicate sterling silver chains offering hugs, and tiny Bibles, and tiny pastel knitted baby blankets.
Closed for Good
Their homemade sparkly pink sign on the door reads.
The crowd collectively cries No.
Godzilla sighs and restarts her slow stomp down the road, leaving behind bloody footprints, and big baby head billboards.
Amy Cipolla Barnes is the author of three collections: Mother Figures (ELJ Editions, 2021), Ambrotypes (Word West LLC, 2022), and Child Craft (Belle Point Press, 2023.) She has words at The Citron Review, Spartan Lit, JMWW Journal, No Contact Mag, Leon Review, Complete Sentence, Gone Lawn, The Bureau Dispatch, Nurture Lit, X-R-A-Y Lit, McSweeney’s, Cease, Cows and many others. Her writing has been nominated for Best of the Net, the Pushcart Prize, Best Microfiction, and long-listed for the Wigleaf Top 50 in 2021, 2022, and 2023, and included in The Best Small Fictions 2022. She’s a Fractured Lit associate editor, Gone Lawn co-editor, Ruby Lit assistant editor, and reads for The MacGuffin, The Best Small Fictions, CRAFT, and Narratively.