NUMB-NUMB by Marc Tweed

Her baby blew a spit bubble and reached for her with its squishy, underinflated arms, and they both giggled. She and her baby had been spending their days at the sticky, fluorescent food court in Glenwood Mall, which wasn’t quite dead, unlike lots of other malls across that part of the country. There were even people living in some of the other malls, the ones that couldn’t stay open for nothing. They’d start fires, and you’d hear about it on the news all the time. Another fire, and who are these ghosts that disappear into the night even as the sirens emerge from some brick building within earshot? But Glenwood Mall was hanging on for dear life, and she was glad because Glenwood Mall was right by their apartment. 

For hours and hours, she and her baby watched dirty paper plates and Styrofoam cups crawl the grubby tile of the food court floor—in search of what, she did not know—and the bright mall lights made them both slightly yellow: a pair of dazed canaries whiling away the day together. She was grateful the place existed, if not exactly happy to be there again. The Glenwood Mall was a blessing and a curse, especially the food court, which was neither regal nor litigious, and only barely nutritious. Nope, it isn’t quite dead yet, she thought, and neither are we, Baby. She had lots of funny thoughts when she and her baby were at Glenwood Mall practically all day.  

Today, though, her baby wouldn’t eat, not for nothing!  

“Alright, I know, I know. When I was in college I’d go days, even a week,” she whispered, brushing dirty blonde hair from her eyes. 

She looked around to make sure no one was in earshot and lowered her voice to let the baby know this information was to be held in strict confidence. “Two weeks. Where I wouldn’t eat a thing—or maybe just a candy bar or something extremely small.”  

On the large, silent television screen positioned next to Potato Korner, the news dripped with bodies leaking blood, disintegrating souls spilling their consciousnesses out onto sidewalks dirty and clean, fouling with their regrets culverts and ditches and bowling alleys and gun stores. Bodies alone, hands made into little fists. Bodies far away and some shockingly close by. Reggaeton streamed quietly but persistently over the mall’s sound system. And here she was, suspended in a long, fluorescent heartbeat, loudly sucking her tongue, watching people wind their way through the food court while the televisions displayed horror after horror? How and why? She was glad when the commercial for macaroni & cheese replaced the world at war.

Nearby, a thin security guard with a wispy moustache had taken position in an abandoned ear-piercing kiosk. His beady eyes darted between her and her baby for over an hour, and she thought she saw him take a pill of some kind at one point, which made him sort of mysterious in her eyes. Speed, she thought to herself, with a degree of nostalgia she found alarming. A longing enveloped her brain as strong and pervasive as the cling-wrap method her grandmother used to punish her and all the cousins—the face-grasping kraken that inhabited and issued forth from the Grandmother Mind, its tense masking embrace rendering the children frozen in shame and fear. And then there was her mother.  

“Old. Child. Caterpillar.” A voice called over the intercom, followed by laughter. Mean laughing. Bored teenagers. 

But, anyway, her baby needed to eat every day. All the magazines said it should. 

“Numb-numb,” she told it, waving the spoon in front of its blank little face.

Her baby had a quiet, rubbery quality to it, she thought, disappointed. It was almost too agreeable. It is too agreeable, she mouthed silently to the security guard (to his obvious surprise) as the full jar of strained carrots sat between her and her baby like stakes in a poker game. She talked to her baby, here and there sucking her lips in and out, folding them into her mouth to form a straight line which was a lip-stickless habit of hers. 

“And, really, over time, you know, I realized it actually seemed to work for me, health-wise, and I guess mentally, too. Hardly eating anything at all.”

“Number seven with cheese. Cherry Coke.” Someone hustled over to fetch it.

“I felt so focused,” she told her baby. 

She shot it a wistful smile, as if it could grasp the sordid complexities of her life before it was born. Then she slipped two extra-large onion rings over its wrists like bracelets. She watched it squirm in its highchair while, across the wide, yellow expanse of the food court, a different baby sputtered and wailed. It’s mother had zero control. 

“Back then I had a boyfriend who…” her voice trailed off, and she took a bite of an egg roll and thought about it, her eyes darting to meet the security guard’s. He leaned forward on his tall stool in the kiosk, straining to hear, so she spoke a little louder.

“He had a trust fund, I think. He was very cautious is the main thing. That I remember. Can you say, ‘onion ring’? Yeah? Can you? He took short, measured steps.” She showed the baby with her fingers how the college boyfriend had walked all those years ago. 

“See?” she told it. “Say onion ring.” 

Her Mountain Dew t-shirt was tight under the white parka she’d been wearing every day for months. The security guard mouthed onion ring then looked away, embarrassed for a moment. She broke off a piece of her eggroll and placed it in her baby’s open mouth, satisfied to see it begin to gummily chew. “Numb-numbs,” she said to it again in a high, fragile voice, swooping a full spoon of carrots at it and winking at the security guard. Numb-numbs. She loved the sound of these two soft syllables and the enticing lullaby in her voice as she sang it to her baby. She had been in a choir some years ago. And the baby did not cry. It ate the strained carrots, even with what she would say might have been some enthusiasm!

*

The apartment she and her baby rented was too small and too quiet. Her baby didn’t scream and writhe and wail like the other baby at the food court. And that was great she supposed, but it was too much silence with just her and her baby, no matter how loud she cranked her Billy Ocean cassettes. In general, she wished her baby would act more like it gave a fuck and maybe someday, she hoped, it would. But until then, they would make a little trip to the mall every afternoon to give their ears and eyes something to chew on. 

She had a neighbor named Lonna who was running some sort of religious organization out of her apartment. There would be people in the hallways at all hours and the way she knew this wasn’t because they made any kind of sound at all—in fact, they were barefoot and button-mouthed without exception. But she liked to look out the little peephole in her door to see how the wallpaper and light fixture out there looked curved. And she would see them quite a lot, walking slowly and silently past her door and sometimes she’d see Lonna among them, nodding to them, mouthing words. Why religious? Because they all wore funny little hats with a single Christmas bulb on top pulsing green light. Or maybe they were some kind of sports team? A neighborhood watch?

It was taking a long time for the baby to grow—she thought about that often.

 *

The security guard finally sheepishly ambled over. She could see now that he was short and gaunt and his uniform was free to blow almost imperceptibly in the swift current flowing from heating vents overhead and underfoot. So loose, his outfit! He pretended to tousle her baby’s hair without touching it, then pulled his hand abruptly back as if he’d done something he shouldn’t. His lips were curled painfully into what she guessed was a smile. She pointed to the baby and told him, “Go ahead.” She put the rest of the egg roll in her mouth and chewed, looking at him with a blank expression.

“Hey,” he said with a baritone lisp. He sat down at an adjacent table and cradled his face in his hands, puffing his cheeks out and told the baby, “Nice baby.”

Is it a nice baby? She wondered.

“Peek-a-boo.”

There was an uncomfortable silence and the security guard began visibly sweating. He adjusted the lapel of his jacket and smoothed out his wrinkled shirt underneath.

“Now they got radio signals coming in from space,” he finally said, brushing some crumbs off the table while he looked back and forth between her and her baby. She buried her chin in her shoulder and smiled at him with the tip of her tongue sticking out just a little from the corner of her mouth. 

“I’d love to make dinner for you and your baby,” he said very sincerely, tripping over every syllable. 

*

The security guard’s apartment overlooked a couple acres of treeless land that bordered the long western wall of a single-story nursing home.  He explained that some of the people screamed things like “Help me” and “They won’t let me breathe” all hours of every day. He said that many mornings before heading to the mall he would sit outside the nursing home on a dying patch of grass and just listen. He would listen to the screaming and watch the shapes clamor against the frosted-glass windows. He said he thought he heard one woman in particular scream, “I’m Roberta, not Andrina” over and over in a soupy foreign accent, day after day. He paid close attention and wished he could help them. Then it would be time to brush the dirt from his baggy pants and start the long walk to the mall. He made sure to walk close to the highway, leaning into the engine noise and screaming air in which he was sure he could hear his own voice mumbling loud, “you’ve really done it now,” or “you’re going to do it now.” Something to that effect.

He made them macaroni and cheese with garlic salt and her baby wolfed it down like a shark. She was so glad to see this and she looked at the security guard and winked without saying anything as she didn’t want to distract her baby from eating all that stuff.

Later, they all sat on his couch and watched a movie about a nun who kept two ferrets as pets. The nun was sincere but sloppy and the ferrets were constantly slipping out of their enclosure, out into the world to cause what usually turned out to be some inconvenience for all sorts of people and businesses. They laughed a lot, even her baby did. When the movie was over, the security guard looked at them almost as if he’d never seen them before. He excused himself and spent a long time in his bathroom, and then he drove them home in his Honda Civic, which smelled clean. She liked how clean it smelled in there.

*

The next afternoon, she and her baby were back at the food court in Glenwood Mall. “Remember about my college boyfriend? Remember I was telling you about him? I was never sure whether I was saying or doing the right thing around him,” she said, as if they had just been talking about him moments before. “He was born into money. Furniture store money.”

But her baby had eaten half a jar of strained carrots and quickly fallen asleep. 

The security guard had already assumed his position in the abandoned kiosk.  With the baby lightly snoring and the security guard staring at them like they were expensive jewelry, her heart became an abyss so forbiddingly deep that no creature would ever touch its floor except to die there. She watched him put his hands over his own heart, then she turned to her sleeping baby, lowered her eyes seriously and said, “Look, there will be a day when you’ll visit me in a big rectangular linoleumed-tiled room full of people waiting to die and it will smell awful in there. Sort of like here at the food court. Remember what he told us last night? You remember last night? About the building and the grandmas and grandpas? Anyway, some terrible stuff—way worse than the food court—years of horrifying stuff will happen to me in there. Like those people on TV but much, much slower. But pay no mind. You’ll have your own problems to lose sleep over. Pay no mind.” 

The baby woke and yawned. 

“Be ready,” she told it.

It contorted its face into the shape of a cinnamon roll.

“Your father had long, thin fingers,” she whispered, and then her baby began quietly crying and thrust it wrists out as if it were expecting to be arrested.

*

One night, for no apparent reason, she and her baby had many intense nightmares. And just before dawn she woke and went to where her baby slept restlessly on a large pillow on the carpeted floor next to a teak coffee table she had purchased at a garage sale. It had replaced the one her boyfriend in college had given her, then destroyed in a fit of rage. She got down on all fours and said to her baby, “Dance with arms out like a bird. Give the people in the disco or whatever they will call it in the future something to feel good about for a change. Then it will be your turn,” and her voice was tense and springy, a rubber bullet ricocheting off the mirrors, the windows, and the walls of their dark, otherwise silent apartment.

Marc Tweed is a frequent contributor to NOON Annual and his fiction has also appeared in Hobart, New World Writing Quarterly, Juked, The Normal School, Cleaver, X-R-A-Y, and many other literary journals. His story Mean World was longlisted for the Wigleaf Top 50 of 2022. He lives in Seattle, where he works as a technology writer. He is writing a novel and has completed a collection of short stories and poems.

7 February 2025