Managing Editor Lisa Ampleman: The title of this miCRo immediately caught my attention: a baby dying is one of the worst things imaginable. Jenny Bitner manages to evoke that horror (with references to things like David Foster Wallace’s story “Incarnations of Burned Children”) even as she negates it. As a parent, I read this story with gritted teeth; it itself is a trigger warning, in a way. With candid facts and personal recollections, this speaker interrogates why flash fiction includes the deaths of children.
To hear Bitner read the piece, click below:
No Babies Died in the Making of This
Have you noticed how many flash stories there are about babies dying? I feel guilty for giving my writing class a story about a whole family killed by their father. One of the students is eight months pregnant. I’m a monster. I almost assigned another baby-death story, but I saved her from that one, that David Foster Wallace one where the child boils alive in his diaper. A flash story where the whole point seems to be the death of the baby. Is it good because I always remember the horribleness of it, or is it really just horrible?
Children dying is easy picking for flash stories because they’re supposed to shock us, right, and make us feel something—feel anything, goddamn it! And who wouldn’t feel something (fucking something) at the death of a baby, right?
There was a gravestone I always went to in my childhood in Middletown, Pennsylvania: two children were huddled inside a cave, and on the bottom in carved marble it said, Jesus needed more jewels for his crown, he took all we had. There I was, seven years old, missing teeth, learning to read, and I moved over the marble of those words with my fingers and thought about a child of four and a child of two dying within three days of each other.
I look for the stories that tell something without the tiny guillotines. The nurse told me when I held my son for the first time that it’s actually really hard to kill a baby. She was trying to reassure what must have looked like the most anxious mother in the history of California Pacific. It isn’t, not really. Not if you are trying. Not if you are an author and you have in front of you all of the depraved sickness of humanity, the stupid mistakes that keep people up: the hot car seats, the accidental drownings, the cholera, is there a fence around your pool? the pneumonia, diarrhea, malaria, the 3.1 million children who die each year from starvation, the battery swallowed, the common household poisons, the falling, tumbling out of window, the stillbirths, the drug addicts, the drive-by shootings. No, there are a lot of ways.
There are a lot of ways to kill a baby and none of them are in this story.
Jenny Bitner is a writer, hypnotist and coach. Her novel, Here Is A Game We Could Play, was published in 2021 by Acre Books. She is at work on an autofiction novel and lives in San Francisco with her teen and two cats, Tenzing and Zukie. Find out more at jennybitner.com
