By Rupert Fike

I.

Eight o’clock Sunday morning, and the Saddest Baby in the Whole World just will not stop crying here in our rows of orange plastic chairs at Pre-Trial Detention way downtown, the Saddest Baby wailing even while being held by the Youngest Mother in All Atlanta, the girl-mom shushing her babe, but what’s the point of that? This is not a crowded airplane or some chichi restaurant—this is the place where you should be crying, this is the place where it’s fully appropriate to weep, all of us on the orange plastic chairs smiling to the baby because we cannot cry—they won’t give you somebody from behind the big steel doors if you’re losing your shit (it’s like a rule or something). So we work to maintain our air of studied indifference, the lie that binds us, the ones who answered our phone at six and are now tasked with using our freedom to spring some poor soul who has lost theirs, a soul who, Persephone-like, remains trapped in the cinderblock underworld behind those big steel doors that only rarely give their double-buzz then open so a guard and prisoner can emerge into this hall where the Saddest Baby is holding court, all of us on the orange plastic chairs gelling into community, swapping our secret, knowing nods —“Yeah, baby. You keep right on crying. We don’t care one bit. You cry for us too.”

II.

But now the Youngest Mother in All Atlanta has pulled a miracle from her bag—the Longest Fattest Cheeto in the Ever-expanding Universe, the Saddest Baby seeing the Cheeto as good the way Yahweh saw all creation as good after those long days of work, the baby stopping her crying to reach for it, want it, all of us on the orange chairs now passing new looks, a shared understanding that the air trapped within that longest, fattest Cheeto is blessed from containing molecules once exhaled by, take your pick—Gautama, Jesus, Allah,—it doesn’t matter, somebody really important, and sure, we know this is a big fat conceit, but we don’t care, we go with it because we’re tired, we’re bored, we’ve put up big money, we hate it here and we cannot cry. Plus look, an omen, the Saddest Baby in the World has two front teeth, perfect for biting the Cheeto and freeing its healing air—All our trials, Lord…Soon be over…

III.

And this is when the big steel doors buzz twice then open for an extra-large guard leading a slump-shouldered young man out of that cinderblock underworld, his hollered-out name causing the Youngest Mother to stand and go forward with her rep from Free at Last Bail Bonds, her voice so warbly-faint the extra-large guard yells at her twice to speak up.“Yes,” She finally gets it out. “Yes. That’s my Terrence,” this the precise moment we hear the so-softest crunch in our Limitless Galaxy, the Saddest Baby’s two teeth crushing the Cheeto, the longest, fattest thing exploding, all of us on the orange plastic chairs leaning forward to take in deep lungfuls of that most blessed air, the ether we now know came not from some venerated holy person but from hair-netted Maria, a Guatemalan single mom working the graveyard shift in the dankest Frito-Lay plant, and it’s Maria’s exhalations, this is the redeeming air that kisses all our blood as we watch the baby, the mother and the still-slumped young man first embrace then speak those most healing words—Let’s go to the Waffle House—before they’re walking on out of this vale and into a too-bright world where it’s still really early on a clear Sunday morning.

~~~~~

Rupert Fike’s second collection of poems, Hello the House (Snake Nation Press) was named one of the “Books All Georgians Should Read, 2018” by The Georgia Center for the Book. His stories and poems have appeared in The Southern Poetry Review, The Sun, storySouth, Kestrel, Scalawag Magazine, The Georgetown Review, A&U America’s AIDS Magazine, The Flannery O’Connor Review, Duende, The Buddhist Poetry Review, Natural Bridge, and others.