To help her sleep, we give the baby a basketball, a full-size regulation ball that my husband, CT, puts in her crib one night. He writes her name on it with a black Sharpie, bold letters like they would appear on a jersey.
“Ten months is a little young,” I say.
“Never too early for our little athlete,” he says. CT played college ball for a season until he blew out his knee. The first thing he said when he held her was that she was the longest baby he’d ever seen. She came home from the hospital in a UCONN onesie.
When I check on her before I go to bed, she’s still awake with one tiny hand on the ball. She’s never been a good sleeper, but the last month has been significantly worse. She just stares at the slowly spinning mobile of the galaxy above her head, sometimes reaches for it with her fists. I kiss her on the forehead and whisper that the basketball is like the earth. A little poet is never too young for simile.
In the morning, CT makes us coffee while I go get the baby. She’s asleep. The basketball is on the floor under the crib and the Sharpie is clutched in her hand. I turn on the light.
The walls are covered with math. Math formulas and numbers and equations and graphs and angles and shapes and arrows that direct us from next to the crib to above the changing table to the closet door to behind the rocker and under the window and then back to the crib.
“Oh, fuck,” says CT, handing me a mug of coffee.
“Language,” I whisper.
“But,” he says, looking around.
“Yeah, fuck,” I say.
CT calls a mathematician while I try to feed the baby, but she wants nothing to do with the Cheerios or blueberries I put in front of her. She just bangs her spoon on the table. She’s got dark circles under her eyes and it’s like looking in a mirror. I can’t remember the last time I’ve slept through the night.
“We did this,” I say to CT, who is now Googling “baby math.”
“Did what?” He asks.
“Stressed her out,” I say.
“Maybe it’s just math,” he says, putting some pumpkin puree down in front of the baby. “Maybe it’s nothing.”
I spoon out some puree and bring it towards her, but she just clamps her mouth shut and grabs the spoon. I call my mom and ask if she can come over for a bit.
My mother agrees to take the baby to the park while we meet with the mathematicians. The park’s only a few blocks away, but with all the gear, I suggest she takes the car. On her way out the door, baby on one hip, car seat hooked over her elbow, she raises her eyebrows at me and says, “I told you she was gifted.” She kisses the baby on the top of her head and coos, “Gramma’s little genius.”
Two mathematicians arrive a few minutes later. They are younger than I expected. One is wearing a sweater vest. They both have glasses and are carrying briefcases. The men stand in the middle of the nursery and turn slowly from wall to wall to wall. The taller of the two men takes off his glasses and cleans them. He puts them back on. He opens his briefcase, takes out a notebook, and writes something down. He closes his notebook.
“Well?” asks CT, sitting down in the rocker.
“Wow,” says the shorter man. “Amazing, really,” he says, taking a deep breath. He points at the wall under the crib. “She starts by calculating the weight of the earth,” he says.
“She’s a baby,” says CT.
“That’s pretty simple math, actually,” the mathematician says, “She just needs the weight of any sphere,” he points at the basketball, “and then she can plug it into Newton’s formula for universal gravitational attraction.”
The taller man interrupts. “It gets much more sophisticated over here,” he says, pointing to the left of the closet. He bounces a bit on his toes. “It looks like she’s using semi-parametric predictive modeling to determine existential risk.” He leans towards the wall and squints. He wipes his hands on his pants. He looks at the shorter man and shakes his head.
“Wait,” the shorter man says, “Is that strategy optimization for carbon reduction at the bottom of the door?”
I stare at him, waiting for something I understand, a word, a phrase, a gesture. CT puts his head in his hands. “I have no idea what’s happening,” he says.
“I think she’s looking for a solution,” the tall man says, and when we don’t respond, he says, as if we’re children, “To climate change.”
“But,” I say, and I don’t know what comes after that. I don’t even know what to ask. I think of everything we’ve ever said in front of her, thinking she couldn’t understand. We watch the news during playtime. We listen to NPR in the car. We fight about solar panels and electric cars and how much meat to eat. When I was pregnant, we even fought about whether it was responsible to bring a baby into this world. Did she hear all that? Did she feel it?
CT stands up. “This is fucking ridiculous,” he says. He’s the one who suggested Meatless Mondays. He’s the one who wants a Prius. He’s the one who thought we should skip flying to see his parents this year so we could afford panels on our roof.
“Wait,” the shorter man says, and looks at his partner for confirmation. He points to the right of the door. “There. Is she using partial differential equations to see if…” and then he stops, squatting in front of the wall nearest the crib. He shakes his head. The taller man keeps putting his hands in his pockets and taking them out again. “It looks like she gave up.” He’s tapping the wall where our baby scribbled with the Sharpie, age appropriate markings that in another world could have been made with crayon or finger paint. “She gave up,” he repeats.
“She’s a fucking baby,” CT says, and his voice cracks. “A fucking baby.”
“I just want her to be happy,” I say. “I just want her to write poetry,” I say. CT pulls me into a hug. “Or play basketball,” I say into his neck.
“She can be a poet-athlete,” he says, and we both start to cry.
I check on the baby before I go to bed. Her room still smells of fresh paint, a new color CT picked up at the hardware store after the mathematicians left this morning. Butter yellow to match the stuffed duck he bought on his way home. While the baby napped this afternoon, I took down the universe mobile and replaced it with the one his sister bought us for the baby shower–green giraffes and purple hippos–and CT painted over the math. We’d thought about keeping it, but decided it was all just too heavy for a baby.
“It’s a clean slate,” he’d said when he finished.
The baby is awake and content. She moves her hands in front of her face as if she’s in awe of them, as if she’s still working out whose they are. It’s the way she used to look at me.
“It’s a blank page,” I whisper to her now, and kiss her on the forehead. And before I leave, I tuck a Sharpie into the corner of her crib, just in case.
Emily Rinkema lives and writes in northern Vermont, USA. Her writing has recently appeared in SmokeLong Quarterly, X-R-A-Y Lit, Variant Lit, and Flash Frog, and she has stories in the Best American Nonrequired Reading, Bath Flash, and Oxford Flash anthologies. She won the 2024 Cambridge Prize and the 2024 Lascaux Prize for flash fiction. You can read her work on her website (https://emilyrinkema.wixsite.com/my-site) or follow her on X, BS, or IG (@emilyrinkema).
Okay Donkey 