Irony (A Fictional Short)

Whatever, she thought. I'll just take it and get the suspense over with. There is no use in worrying about something that isn't even happening. She pulled one of the cylindrical foil wrappers out of the box and stuck it in the waist band of her pajama bottoms. Sleepily, she padded to the bathroom and shut the door.

*******

Three minutes later, the boxes lit up with vertical blue lines, little minus signs, and Brynn breathed a heavy sigh of relief. Geez, I'm such a dumbass, she thought, stepping into the shower. I'm never letting this happen again. Lesson learned.

Steam filled the room. But... she thought. It's a little sad to think that I acted THIS stupid and I still didn't get pregnant. Maybe I'm incapable of getting pregnant. Maybe I'm barren. I mean, it only happened those two times, but the timing! She started freaking herself out, thinking about it. What if she married Leo, like she wanted to someday, and then she couldn't have children. She'd be devastated. Adoption just wouldn't be the same. She wanted the whole shebang. The whole experience. She wanted it to be a part of her and Leo, swimming around inside her gut like nature intended to create it. Getting out of the shower, she stared at herself in the mirror and touched her stomach, just once. Its just you and me, you dusty ole uterus. We're all alone.

She dried her reddish hair, thinking about what she would wear to work. She'd had to move home to her father's house after a breakin at her apartment complex conventiently coincided with the bottoming out of her bank account. She had blamed it on the breakin.

She straightened her hair, put on makeup, and just before she walked out the bathroom door, she picked up the test stick off the counter. It was still laying face up, looking at her, no blue plus sign in sight. She held it up and noticed that she couldn't even see where the other line to complete the plus was, down in there. It was just two lines. Two little minus signs.

“Thank god,” Brynn mumbled, and she tucked it inside her wet towel, walked back down the hall and shut the door to her room. Her feet made little moisture impressions on the hardwood floor.

*******

The only thing she could reach for was her phone. Her hands were shaking and it took her three tries to dial the number. It rang once, twice, three times, four times, voice mail. She tried again. She was shaking all over, pure shock. The phone pressed to her ear, she stepped out into the hall then realized she wasn’t dressed and stepped back into her room. She put the phone on the bed, threw on a blue dress from her closet, and picked the phone back up.
“Hello?” But it was still ringing.

“Are you okay in there?” Her father was knocking on the door. She glanced at the clock. She needed to keep getting ready or something would look wrong.
“Uh… yeah. Yeah, I’m just—I have a… problem. Everything’s fine!”
“Well, I’m leaving for work, okay? I’ll see you this afternoon.”
She could hear her father’s shoes on the linoleum, headed for the back door, and she felt this sudden pang of homesickness like when she rode the bus to school for the first time in fourth grade and cried the whole way.
“Have a good day at work, honey!” And she heard the door shut.

Brynn walked into the hallway and stared down the length of the house at the back door her father had just left through.
What the hell was she going to do?

*******

“What the hell am I going to do?” She was laying on the bed, fifteen minutes until she should leave for work. Leo had finally answered.
“I don’t know… I don’t know.”
“I mean, congrats, you know. Your junk works. And so does mine. Who knew.”
“Brynn, you’ve gotta calm down. Everything will be okay.”
“Leo, everything will not be okay.”
“How could you have misread the test?”
“I don’t know. I thought it was supposed to make a plus sign.” She picked up the box and read the side panel for the tenth time. One line, not pregnant. Two lines, pregnant. “The outside of the box is very explicit, Leo, it’s got little two line tests all over it. It’s obviously geared toward women who are praying for this to happen. It’s desensitizing, it’s romantic, it’s SICK.”
“Brynn…” Leo sighed on his end of the phone. “I just knew that’s what it was.” He chuckled, suddenly. “I just knew you were going to call and say you were pregnant. I woke up and realized you’d been calling three times in a row and I knew, right then.”
“You woke up real fast, huh.”
“Yeah.”
Brynn was looking around the room, at her kid-sized room for a twenty-three-year-old. The stuffed animals on shelves, the Little Mermaid comic books still stacked on the top of her bookcase. And that’s when it hit her. She couldn’t do this any more than those girls on MTV. She couldn’t do it. She wasn’t financially stable. Her parents hadn’t even met Leo. She was as good as sixteen years old.
“Oh, God, Leo… I can’t do this.” She realized she was crying. “I can’t do this to them. I can’t do this at all.”
“What do you mean?”
“I can’t… this can’t… I can’t do this. I can’t take care of this. We made a freakin baby, and I can’t do this. I can’t do this to my family, because they’d be the ones--”
“--Brynn…”
She wished he was there. She wanted someone to hold her and let her cry it all out for the sheer tragedy of crying into the shoulder of someone who could now be called the father of her child.
“Brynn, I’m here, okay. I’m here no matter what you do.”

*******

She left for work in a fog. She and Leo would meet on their lunch breaks. She’d have to hold it in until then. She was surprised how fast she could compose herself. And she drove to work like nothing was wrong. She made the right turn, the left, the right, and the radio played the same songs. And the traffic was just as bad as always. And a tiny part of her and Leo was still swimming around in her gut like nature intended to create it.