“We had to go outside to screw,” Connie said.
My wife was holding their baby. I didn’t know what she was thinking. We were all nineteen, twenty years old.
“Our own party, and we had to go outside and screw in our car,” Connie’s husband Butch said. He stretched his legs and crossed slippered feet at the ankles.
“All our unmarried friends were making out. We got so hot!” Connie was telling us how she got pregnant again.
“Excuse me,” my wife said. She handed the baby back to Connie. She said she was going down the hall to our apartment to check on our boy in his crib.
My wife and I had never given a party. My wife, too, got pregnant in a car, but that was before we were married, when we still had a car. She never got over it.
Merle Drown is the author of stories, essays, plays, reviews, and two novels, Plowing Up A Snake (The Dial Press) and The Suburbs Of Heaven (Soho Press, 2000), trade paperback (Berkley Press, 2001). He edited Meteor in the Madhouse, the posthumous novellas of Leon Forrest, published by Northwestern University Press in 2001. Barnes and Noble chose The Suburbs of Heaven for its Discover Great New Writers series. He has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the NH Arts Council. He teaches in Southern N.H. U's MFA program. These pieces are from his collection-in-progress, Shrunken Heads, miniature portraits of the famous among us, or Balzac in a nutshell. Pieces have appeared in Amoskeag, Meetinghouse, Night Train and 971 Menu.