Sticky, stinky fingers switched off my cigarette. Fuck, there's gotta be a better way to know if you've fucked up your life besides pissing on a stick and yourself.
Taking another drag, I shake the wand like Hermione, hoping the image of "not knocked up" magically appears. Abracadabra.
I close my eyes and count backwards. "10, 9, 8, 7, 6.""Babe, Tim and I just jumped five guys. We totally destroyed their sorry asses," he proudly shouts behind comic book pages-plastered wall. R.I.P. Doktor Sleepless.
"Jackass, those 'sorry asses' are probably little kids. Congratulations, you destroyed some children," I replied. Instantly I wish I could take it back.
Worry number # 4—he might accidentally hurt or kill a civilian. He'd come back a mangled mental version of the man he was when he left, a man I wouldn't know, and probably a man I wouldn't want to know. Shit, I am not ready for this. The weight in my head competing with the imagined weight in my belly...hopefully imagined. My mind never stops the irrational troubled thoughts from the surface; how am I going to function when the worries are not only plausible, but probable. When the game is real and he's holding a gun instead of a controller.
"Kids or not, these fuckers are good," he yells back. I hear the gunfire stop for a moment in the background, while the wheels in his head began to turn. Collecting himself from the lost minutes and hours of gaming, he calls, "Honey, you've been in there for a bit. Are you ok? Gotta big poop?" he couldn't stop himself from questioning.
The warfare noise resumed before I needed to come up with a lie. Placing the test on the counter, I take a final drag, put out the glow of the end of the cigarette on the white counter, chuck it down the toilet, and flush.
In the mirror, I see the face of an old woman—lines, wrinkles, and crow's feet not yet apparent, but hidden behind sad eyes. Her eyes look in the mirror, down at the reflection of the piss stick, trying to see but not see the results. With his flight from McChord for a yearlong deployment scheduled tomorrow, how much worse can it get, I think. My reflection grabs the stick and puts it before my own eyes. Blue. One bold, blue line.
Pregnant. Squinting, it's undeniable. The nine months play in my lonely mind. Checkups alone, learning the sex without the father, a bloodied, birthing battlefield while he would be in another battlefield, thousands of miles away.
But tell him? How to tell your man if the war doesn't end his carefree days, coming home to a baby will?
"Babe, come on. You promised you'd play Call of Duty with me at least once before I go." I look back at the eyes of the woman in the mirror as the stick slips from my hand, rattling against the garbage bin like a discharged shell hitting the ground.
N. Joy Lutton is a beer-brewing, vegan runner who lives in Tacoma, WA with her husband and two dogs. She is Managing Editor of Arroyo Literary Review, Vol II, and writes for the University of Washington and The Ranger. Her fiction has or is scheduled to appear in The Short Humour Site, 50 to 1, and Kerouac's Dog.
